Whistle‑blower sacked by SACAA after raising concerns about regulator’s 2020 crash, says The Citizen

According to The Citizen, the South African Civil Aviation Authority (SACAA) has dismissed an airworthiness inspector who raised concerns about the regulator’s own aircraft crash and says he described his report as a protected disclosure.

Inspector suspended then dismissed

The Citizen reports that airworthiness inspector and former air crash investigator Jeremiah Visser was suspended soon after making a disclosure about the January 2020 crash of ZS‑CAR and was later dismissed following a disciplinary process.

Whistleblowing route and further actions

According to The Citizen, Visser said he used SACAA’s internal Vuvuzela whistleblowing mechanism in March to make what he regarded as a protected disclosure based on concerns arising from his research into the crash. After lodging the whistleblowing report, Visser told The Citizen he approached Transport Minister Barbara Creecy’s office, the Public Protector and Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Transport.

Court bid and manuscript dispute

The Citizen says the regulator went to court in July in an urgent attempt to prevent Visser from publishing or sharing a manuscript he had written about the accident and its investigation; the application was unsuccessful.

Visser told The Citizen he had spent years raising concerns about the crash before lodging the whistleblowing report in March, and that he had raised issues since 2021.

SACAA response and claims of proprietary information

Quoting SACAA, The Citizen reports spokesperson Sisa Majola as saying:

“The SACAA has no obligation to confirm the correctness or incorrectness of the information in the manuscript.”

The Citizen also reports Majola saying SACAA regarded the information used by Visser as proprietary and warned against its use:

“It is even worse when that information is the proprietary information of the Sacaa which is protected and must not be used for any personal agendas and personal gain by any Sacaa employee.”

The Citizen adds Majola’s framing that confidentiality concerns were secondary to what SACAA regarded as Visser allegedly contravening its policies and his contractual obligations.

Legal defence and rebuttal

The Citizen reports that Visser’s attorney, Emile Myburgh, rejected SACAA’s proprietary information argument, saying:

“Their confidentiality requirement is just to keep their dirty laundry secret.”

The Citizen says Myburgh described SACAA’s court application as a baseless claim and said Visser had at all times honoured his confidentiality obligations and had not disclosed the manuscript to unauthorised parties.

Background: the crash investigation

The Citizen notes the context of a longer-running controversy over the accident investigation. It reports that three SACAA employees pilot Captain Thabiso Tolo, First Officer Tebogo Lekalakala and Flight Inspector Gugu Comfort Mnguni died when their SACAA‑owned Cessna Citation S550, operated for airport calibration flights, struck mountainous terrain about 30 km from the airport in George in the Western Cape.

The Citizen reports that SACAA’s initial findings placed blame on pilot error; grieving families did not accept that conclusion and sought a separate investigation. The Citizen says then transport minister Fikile Mbalula asked the Ethiopian Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau to conduct that separate investigation, which the Ethiopians released in January 2022. The Citizen reports the Ethiopian report broadly agreed that pilot error was the probable cause but noted a number of violations of aviation regulations by SACAA in its role as operator, including a substandard flight data recorder, and recommended that responsibility for investigations be separated from the aviation oversight authority.

What remains public

The Citizen reports Visser declined requests for a copy of the manuscript, citing confidentiality. The Citizen says SACAA maintained that information used by Visser was proprietary and protected, while Visser and his lawyers disputed that claim.