Airlines South African Express suspends operations

The SACAA has revoked SA Express’ AOC as well as the airworthiness certificate for nine of the twenty-one aircraft being operated by SA Express. The decision to suspend SA Express is based on the audit findings by SACAA on SA Express, which, among other things, relate to safety management processes. According to a statement, the regulator said it had found seventeen findings of which five had been categorized as level 1 category finding. A Level 1 category finding can be described as a „severe non-compliance or non-conformance that poses a very serious safety or security risk to the public and will necessitate the immediate exercising of the discretionary enforcement powers vested in the authorized persons, in the interests of safeguarding aviation safety or security‟.

SA Express operates regional flights from its hubs in Johannesburg and Cape town for South African Airways. SA Express South African Express is operationally independent of South African Airways but its flights are incorporated within a strategic alliance with South African Airways.

In a first statement, South African Airways reacted to the operation suspension: “We have a recovery plan which was activated soon after the suspension of SA Express operations.”

To cover the routes unserved currently, South African Airways has announced to add capacity with own flights as well as flights of its subsidiaries Mango Airlines and SA Airlink.

SA Express operates a fleet of ten Bombardier CRJ200, two CRJ700, ten Q400 turboprop aircraft.