Christmas Editorial by Richard Jeffery

Christmas Editorial Comment
Richard Jeffery AOOA President 2019-2021
AOOA Vice-President 2022 December, 2022

I have been a licensed pilot since 1975, flying in Zambia since 1980, notching up about 8,000 flying hours in total. I consider my flying experience an extraordinary privilege, and one that I’d like to believe I have never taken for granted over the past nearly 50 years.

During most of this time I have been associated with the Zambian AOOA and its successive Civil Aviation Authorities to greater and lesser extents, witnessing the ebbs and flows of a well-founded domestic and international aviation industry, with a notable history forged out of solid foundations and core values.

The AOOA has been an important platform representing Zambian private and commercial aircraft owners and operators for well over 50 years. Apart from the many challenges of earlier decades, Zambia’s aviation sector faced difficult times in the early 2000s, not least due to periods of economic downturn, coupled with the challenging transformation of its governance from a Civil Service Department of Civil Aviation into a National Civil Aviation Authority in accordance with international standards as laid down by ICAO (of which Zambia has always been a member).

During 2019, prior to the “Covid-19 era”, I was “re-called” to the AOOA as its President to help re-establish the organization into the National Association it must be as the private sector’s representative aviation platform. Again I consider myself privileged to have been part of this initiative to re-invent the AOOA as a respected partner of the Zambian CAA and ZACL, with a flourishing membership supported by inter-active media platforms including a Members’ Website, and 3 successive strong, representative, progressive, and technically competent Executive Committees (without which I would not have been able to function), including our 2022 President, Captain Josias “Walu” Walubita.

If this editorial comment is beginning to sound like a “retirement speech”, well it partly is just that, although only partly because I do plan to continue to support the AOOA and the aviation sector as a whole whenever I can meaningfully do so. However, my time of more or less continuous “hands on” service to our cause must be handed over to my perhaps (!) younger colleagues in order for it to grow seamlessly into a new era of aviation technology driven by green energy.

However, I’d like to remark that I think you’ll find that the fundamental values, standards and challenges of the aviation sector themselves are unlikely to and should not change that much. Our successive Executive Committees and Memberships to come will find that most if not all of the persisting issues we have been wrestling with over the years require the same solutions which we have inventorised and recorded painstakingly over the past 3 years in our minutes, meetings, reports and recommendations, mostly in conjunction with our Zambia CAA and ZACL partners.

To make my point clear, I personally started lobbying the former DCA on the issue of certification of commercial pilots over the age of 60 when I turned 50 in 2003, ten years before I needed to.

I therefore urge you all not to “drop the ball” on this and a number of our other more pressing and acute challenges, both within the AOOA as well as within the Zambia CAA, ZACL and other lobbying partners. Because Zambia’s aviation sector is not just important, it is crucial to our economy, our development and our social welfare, and we should all want to be part of writing its history.

In closing, I wish you all a festive but meaningful Christmas and Happy New year. Fly safe. “Blue skies” with propitious rain clouds.

Richard Jeffery.