ATNS: Rebuilding Confidence: A Long-Term Investment

Every departure and arrival across South Africa’s busiest airports passes, unseen by most passengers, through the hands of Air Traffic and Navigation Services (ATNS). The state-owned entity manages air traffic across a stretch of Southern African and oceanic airspace equivalent to around 6% of the world’s total, a responsibility that has, in recent years, come under real strain. Global shortages of air traffic controllers and flight procedure designers, a backlog of ageing infrastructure, exiting from the markets of airline operators, and a wave of international poaching have all tested an organisation whose entire purpose rests on precision.

Acting CEO Matome Moholola is blunt about where the business has been, and confident about where three decades of institutional resilience are now taking it. “We have survived many difficult times including the Covid-19 period and the poaching of our Air Traffic Controllers,” he says. “We have put in mechanisms to ensure we get the best value from people and there is now a culture of excellence in ATNS.”

ATNS was established 33 years ago, spun out of the Department of Transport into a standalone entity now employing more than 1,300 people. Around 750 of them are air traffic controllers, working alongside engineers, technicians and support staff who keep the underlying systems running. The organisation’s remit runs well beyond simply directing aircraft: its Air Traffic Management division develops the plans and guidelines behind future ATM and communications, navigation and surveillance systems, while separate teams manage traffic flow, aeronautical information, and the surveying and calibration work that keeps navigation infrastructure accurate. As the Regional Monitoring Agency for Reduced Vertical Separation Minima across Africa and the Indian Ocean, ATNS also carries a safety oversight role that reaches well beyond its own airspace.

Financially, the business has held steady through a difficult period, generating close to R2 billion in revenue in the 2025/26 financial year. “Growth has been moderate,” Moholola says. “That has been very stable over the years.”

FIXING THE BACKLOG

The single issue that had done the most damage to ATNS’s reputation, a growing backlog of overdue flight procedure reviews, has now reached a genuine turning point. Regulations require every instrument flight procedure to be reviewed and refreshed within five years, and as recently as October 2025 ATNS was maintaining 388 such procedures nationally with only two permanent designers and five contractors, several of whom had themselves left for jobs abroad. Only 240 of those procedures, around 61%, were active and approved at the time. “We have now completed the first phase of our procedure designs which have been a thorn in our sides for quite some time,” Moholola says, a milestone that has translated directly into operational stability. There have been no instances in the past 12 months of operators diverting because procedures were not in place at any airport locally, he notes, a marked change from the disruption the shortage had previously caused.

Flight Procedure Design maintenance programme Phase 2 has commenced and is expected to be finalised by 31 December 2026. “This milestone provides much-needed stability and enables us to focus on strengthening our Flight Procedure Design capabilities. Going forward, flight procedure maintenance will be managed through a staggered approach, ensuring their continued availability and reliability.”

That recovery is being reinforced by a capital programme aimed squarely at the infrastructure sitting behind those procedures. “We are modernising our systems and that is a matter of high priority for us,” Moholola says. “For some time, we have been operating on systems that have not been upgraded. A good number of the systems are now obsolete.

“This is one of our biggest opportunities over the next five year. This programme forms a key component of our tariff application cycle for the period 2027/28 to 2031/32. Importantly, much of the foundational work has already been completed, and several projects have been successfully implemented, with new systems and facilities already operational.”

Communication systems and radar and surveillance equipment together account for the bulk of the spend, and the work is being carried out in coordination with the industry regulator, which reviews ATNS’s business case every five years to set tariffs for a monopoly provider, and wider sector stakeholders.

None of that upgrade work happens without a supply chain ATNS has spent years cultivating. “We have solid relationships with many companies including OEMs who provide services and equipment to us across the country. Many of them are global players but we have built strong and lasting relationships with them,” Moholola says. Because the sector is, as he describes, “a safety of life operation”, the bar for any supplier, local or international, is uncompromising. “We have to ensure world class standards. Local suppliers must comply with our standards and they must also be certified by local and international bodies,” he explains, noting that smaller local firms often struggle to clear that bar simply because equipment such as radar systems needs refreshing on a 15-year cycle, a horizon that favours suppliers with the scale to sustain a long-term relationship. Recent projects bear that discipline out: a VOR replacement at King Phalo Airport, originally expected to take around two months, was restored to full operational status within a few weeks after the contractor met every calibration deadline, allowing a suspended instrument landing procedure to be reinstated well ahead of schedule.

A GLOBAL TARGET

Fixing the technical backlog has coincided with a harder problem to solve: keeping the people capable of running the system in the first place. Roughly 20 to 30 of ATNS’s air traffic controllers have left for the UAE and Australia over the past two years, part of a global shortage also being felt in Canada and Greece, and the vacancies have hit hardest at the country’s busiest airport. Moholola is unambiguous about why. “The big superpowers continue to poach from us as an organisation. We have been wondering for some time why we are an easy target, and we have come to understand that the calibre of personnel we have is of a world-class standard, and if anyone wants to poach, our wage parity in SA means offers are easy to make,” he says. “The standard of people we have is the same as you would find at Heathrow or Dubai or JFK.”

Rather than treat the exodus as an existential threat, Moholola frames it as confirmation that ATNS is training people to a genuinely global standard, and is now building the pipeline needed to stay ahead of the departures. A cohort of trainees is progressing through the organisation’s training academy, expected to qualify and start work over the coming year, while safety performance has continued to improve even through the staffing pressure: audit findings closed without any overdue items have climbed sharply, and the organisation’s safety management maturity rating now sits above the global average.

“We want to continue to build a strong pipeline for ourselves,” Moholola says. “At some point, we should have excess capacity and if some of our people are poached then it will not put a dent in our operations.” That ambition sits alongside a broader push to widen ATNS’s regional footprint, underlined by a recent Memorandum of Understanding signed with Botswana’s Civil Aviation Authority to deepen joint training and technology exchange across the region, evidence that the organisation is looking outward for growth even while it repairs the fundamentals at home.

“We recognise that competing solely on remuneration is neither practical nor financially sustainable. Our approach therefore focuses on creating a compelling employee value proposition that includes career development, organisational culture, leadership opportunities and long-term growth.”

Moholola, who joined ATNS in 2011 as a finance manager before rising through the ranks to CFO, a board seat and now the top job, is careful not to overstate how far the turnaround has come. “We are an entity that has turned a corner,” he says. “We have been in the news for all manner of wrong reasons in the past, and we have now stabilised our environment.”

What remains is less about fixing broken systems and more about restoring confidence in an organisation that has already done the harder technical work. “We are looking at restoring trust and confidence of all stakeholders and customers. As a result of that dark past, we have taken a knock on our credibility and reputation and we are now trying to rebuild what has been lost,” he says. “We want to be seen as a resilient organisation that has been able to bounce back from the mess that we were in.”

That resilience, ultimately, is built on the same instinct that has carried ATNS through three decades of change: an unwillingness to compromise on safety even while everything around the organisation, its systems, its staffing, its reputation, has needed rebuilding. Moholola is clear that the work is not finished. “We want to bounce back with full appreciation of the challenges that lay ahead, for example, the people pipeline is something that we are still struggling with,” he admits. But for an organisation responsible for 6% of the world’s airspace, steady, unglamorous progress on procedures, infrastructure and people may be exactly the kind of success story South African aviation needs most.

“The partnerships and collaborations we have strengthened over recent years will remain central to our success as we work together to build a safe, resilient and sustainable aviation industry in South Africa. We remain committed to operational excellence, infrastructure modernisation, skills development and stakeholder collaboration. These priorities will ensure that ATNS continues to play a leading role in supporting the growth and success of South Africa’s aviation sector,” Moholola concludes.