According to Engineering News, South Africa’s Air Traffic and Navigation Services (ATNS) has identified a severe global shortage of flight procedure designers as the primary reason for its inability to maintain the country’s air traffic procedures. Acting CEO Matome Moholola revealed at an October 29 briefing in Johannesburg that the state-owned entity has failed to meet its five-year maintenance mandate for the past decade, operating with only two permanent staff and five contractors to manage 388 procedures. Currently, only 240 procedures (61%) remain active and approved, with the effective compliance rate rising to 66% when excluding obsolete routes. The organization has lost several specialists to higher-paying positions abroad, particularly in the United Arab Emirates and UK, while simultaneously investing R2.1 billion in infrastructure upgrades including R535 million for communication systems and R1.6 billion for radar improvements. This staffing crisis highlights broader challenges facing aviation safety systems worldwide.
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The Invisible Aviation Skill Crisis
Flight procedure design represents one of aviation’s most specialized and least understood professions. These designers create the precise navigation paths that aircraft follow during takeoff, approach, and landing—essentially the invisible highways in the sky. The work requires expertise in aviation regulations, terrain analysis, obstacle evaluation, and performance criteria that varies by aircraft type. What makes this shortage particularly alarming is that unlike air traffic controllers whose absence is immediately visible, procedure designers work behind the scenes, and their scarcity only becomes apparent when procedures expire or become unsafe. The global nature of this shortage means that even wealthy nations are competing for the same limited talent pool, creating a bidding war that state-owned enterprises like ATNS simply cannot win.
The Economics of Aviation Brain Drain
The financial dynamics driving this exodus are stark. When ATNS loses specialists to the United Arab Emirates or other wealthy nations, they’re competing not just with higher salaries but with entire economic ecosystems built around petroleum revenues and tax-free compensation packages. An experienced flight procedure designer can easily triple their income by moving abroad, and given that these skills require years of specialized training, the global market naturally favors wealthier nations. This creates a vicious cycle where developing nations invest in training specialists only to see them emigrate, making the initial training investment economically unsustainable. The situation mirrors challenges in other technical fields where global demand outstrips supply, but with added complexity due to aviation’s stringent safety requirements and certification processes.
Systemic Risks Beyond South Africa
While ATNS’s public apology and transparency about their challenges are commendable, the underlying risk extends far beyond South African airspace. When nearly one-third of mandated procedures aren’t properly maintained, the safety margins that aviation depends on begin to erode. This isn’t just about convenience—it’s about maintaining the precise separation standards, obstacle clearance, and navigation accuracy that prevent accidents. The fact that ATNS has maintained a clean safety record despite these challenges speaks more to the robustness of existing procedures and the skill of their remaining staff than to the sustainability of the current situation. Other developing nations with less transparent systems may be facing similar challenges without public acknowledgment, creating potential blind spots in global aviation safety.
The Training Pipeline Reality Check
ATNS’s solution of developing a pipeline of seven trainees, while necessary, represents a fundamentally inadequate response to the scale of the problem. Flight procedure design requires extensive mentorship and on-the-job training that can take three to five years to produce a fully qualified specialist. With only seven trainees in various stages and continued emigration pressure, the net gain may be negligible. More concerning is the concentration of risk—with so few specialists, the departure of even one or two individuals can cripple operational capacity. The CEO and leadership must consider more radical approaches, including international partnerships, accelerated certification programs, and potentially rethinking compensation structures for critical technical roles.
The Infrastructure Investment Paradox
ATNS’s simultaneous investment in R2.1 billion worth of infrastructure upgrades while struggling with basic staffing creates a troubling paradox. Advanced radar systems and communication networks are worthless without the skilled professionals to design the procedures that utilize them. This reflects a common pattern in aviation infrastructure development where visible, tangible assets receive funding while human capital development gets overlooked. The declining EBITDA (down 22.9% to R185.6-million) suggests financial pressures that will likely further constrain their ability to compete for talent. Organizations facing similar challenges globally must balance capital investment with commensurate spending on human resources, or risk creating sophisticated systems that cannot be properly operated or maintained.
Long-Term Aviation Implications
The ATNS situation serves as a warning for global aviation authorities. As air traffic volumes recover post-pandemic and continue growing, the demand for flight procedure designers will only increase. The specialized nature of this work, combined with aging workforces in many developed nations, suggests this shortage will worsen before it improves. Aviation authorities may need to fundamentally reconsider how these skills are developed, potentially creating international training consortiums or standardized certification processes that allow for greater mobility while ensuring adequate coverage in developing regions. The alternative—increasing reliance on outdated procedures or stretching limited specialists too thin—creates systemic safety risks that could eventually manifest in incidents with tragic consequences.
