A personal perspective on aviation in Guyana

Jul 25, 2015 Letters

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DEAR EDITOR,
By trade, I am a pilot. I have been in aviation for nearly 40 years. I have been a commercial pilot for more than 30 years. For many of those years in management positions. I have been Chief Pilot, Director of Operations and Check Airman for air charter operators in the United States for a total of more than 15 years. I am Airline Transport Pilot rated and have almost 19,000 hours of logged flight time as a pilot.
Over many years of working with and dealing with the people, and bureaucracy, of the Federal Aviation Administration in the United States, I developed an excellent working relationship with many of the inspectors and staff that worked for the FAA.
As a whole the FAA is a professionally run organization, with a very competent staff. This is not to say there are no unprofessional, or incompetent, people working there. There are those in any organization, but, as a whole, a very professionally and competently run organization. I have experience dealing with the National Transportation Safety Board in regard to aviation accidents. I also have experience working with Transport Canada with regard to Canadian certification of U.S. air charter carriers.
All that said, brings me to the point; the Guyana Civil Aviation Authority (GCAA). The GCAA, in my experience, is the most wholly unprofessionally and incompetently run organization I have ever dealt with.
The GCAA currently has no Operations Inspectors. It needs at least one, preferably two to oversee the various operators in Guyana. As it is now the operators police themselves; which is not, necessarily, a good thing. The GCAA has granted authority to a number of pilots to conduct Airman Proficiency Checks (APCs), effectively providing little, or no, oversight by the authority as to the actual competency of the pilot being checked.
To provide an actual aviation Operations Inspector, it is currently necessary to bring in an inspector from the Caribbean Aviation Safety and Security Oversight System (CASSOS). Members of CASSOS are, among others, Trinidad and Tobago, Suriname, Jamaica, as well as Guyana. This is a process that may take months to achieve.
Guyana also needs an INDEPENDENT organization similar to the NTSB in the U.S., to investigate aviation accidents. This agency needs to have transparency and publish the findings of any accidents and incidents so that the aviation community can move forward and learn the causes, and solutions, to these occurrences.
If you were to look into the aviation accident statistics that the NTSB compiles in the U.S., you would see that probably more than 75 percent of these accidents are directly attributable to pilot error. Unless the pilot accidentally or inadvertently flies into a thunderstorm or microburst, or such, weather does not CAUSE an accident; as has been suggested in at least a couple of recent cases in Guyana.
Weather may be a ‘factor’ in an accident, but rarely the ‘cause’ of an accident. In more than one case it was caused by the pilot’s decision to fly into weather conditions that should not have been flown into. Period. Fortunately, in those cases, no lives were lost. But it can happen, and will, if proper oversight, and penalty, are not established, and enforced.
It should also be noted that the Civil Aviation Regulations makes numerous references to being able to be applied ‘as the Authority sees fit’. At the same time, the GCAA takes a hard line and says the rules are the rules and cannot be changed. This is something of a double standard when one pilot may be authorized to fly without complying with a 200-hour rule (generally pilots are required to achieve 200 hours of ‘observer’ time before they may fly anywhere beyond a 75-mile radius around Timehri), while other pilots are required to comply with the rule.
The Civil Aviation Regulations, Paragraph 89; Exemption From Regulations, states, in part, that the “Minister may exempt from any provision, any aircraft or persons” except as provided by Paragraphs 77 and 81. Paragraph 77 references Enforcement and Offences; Revocation, Suspension and Variation of Certificates, Licenses and other documents. Paragraph 81 references Flights over Foreign Countries.
I do understand the need for a certain level of experience flying over the inhospitable local terrain. However, 200 hours is excessive and can take months to achieve. A more realistic figure would be 25 to 50 hours, with checkouts at some of the more challenging airstrips.
In another part of the rules, pilots are required to have a ‘type’ rating in each make and model of aircraft flown, while at the same time not actually defining ‘type’. A ‘type’ rating is normally associated with larger aircraft; aircraft over 12,500lbs (5700kg). In the U.S., as well as many other countries, if a pilot has an Airplane Single-engine Land (category and class) pilot certificate, that pilot may fly; with a few restrictions, ANY single-engine aircraft up to that 12,500lb weight limit, as long as it is not turbo-jet powered.
A type rating is a regulating agency’s certification of an airplane pilot to fly a certain aircraft type that requires additional training beyond (emphasis added) the scope of the initial license and aircraft class training. What aircraft require a type rating is decided by the local aviation authority. In many countries pilots of single-engine aircraft under a certain maximum weight (see above) do not require a type rating for each model, all or most such aircraft being covered by one class rating instead.
There are exceptions to this, e.g. under Joint Aviation Authorities (JAA) regulations the piston version of the Piper Malibu does require its own type rating. In New Zealand and South Africa there is no class rating, each aircraft model requiring its own rating. Countries which have adopted the class rating system for small aircraft typically require additional training and license endorsement for complexity features such as conventional undercarriage (tailwheels), variable-pitch propellers, retractable undercarriage, etc.
Definition of ‘type’ rating (as per the USFAR Part 1):
As used with respect to the certification, rating, privilege and limitation of airmen, means a specific make and basic model of aircraft, including modification thereto, that do not change its handling or flight characteristics, examples include DC7, 1049, and F27; and
As use with respect to the certification of aircraft, means those aircraft which are similar in design. Examples include: DC7 and DC7C; 1049G and 1049H; and F27 and F27F.
Aviation and the airspace system in Guyana are outdated and antiquated. There was a sign by the Embankment Road that read, in part, “Recognizing the Past, Advancing the Future”. It would help if Guyana would, at least, advance into the latter part of the 20th century.
Alan Dortch

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