South African Airways (SA, Johannesburg O.R. Tambo) has temporarily grounded its fleet of three B737-300(F)s as of February 20 due to compliance requirements emanating from a mandatory maintenance action.
Flightradar24 ADS-B data indicates ZS-TGG (msn 24278) last conducted flights on February 20 while ZS-SBB (msn 26072) and ZS-SBA (msn 26070) have been inoperative since February 5 and 15 respectively.
In a statement to ch-aviation, South African Airways said the grounding pertains to delayed installations of updates for each plane's Traffic Collision Avoidance Systems (TCAS). The report states SAA had applied to the South African Civil Aviation Authority (SACAA) for an extension beyond a January 10 deadline for the updates to be applied.
"SACAA allowed us to operate pending the review of our documentation. The regulator rejected the application for exemption. SAA opted to ground its non-compliant aircraft, resubmitted an enhanced application, and now await an outcome in the next few days," spokesman Tlali Tlali said.
The carrier says it has already ordered the requisite tooling and software loader from the United States which should arrive over the coming days.
According to Moneyweb, SAA Cargo has already informed clients that it would not accept any further dedicated freighter bookings until the regulatory issue has been resolved.
Among the destinations affected by the grounding include Cape Town International, Port Elizabeth, East London, and Durban King Shaka domestically and Kenya (Nairobi Jomo Kenyatta), Tanzania (Dar es Salaam), Uganda (Entebbe), the Democratic Republic of Congo (Kinshasa N'Djili), Zambia (Lusaka), Zimbabwe (Harare International), Malawi (Blantyre), Mozambique (Maputo), Namibia (Windhoek International), and Mauritius internationally.
However, to mitigate the impact of the freighter fleet's downtime, SAA has increased use of its bellyhold cargo capacity on its commercial passenger flights.
“We decided to move as much of the cargo as we can on our passenger airline flights," Tlali said. "Where necessary and feasible we have also made arrangements to move the cargo on the services of other airlines.”
