There’s nothing really spectacular, such as warbirds, that is new on our register this month but I see that there is another Robinson R66 and two more Mil MI-8s as well as two more DHC-8-402s for SA Express. Two of their older DHC-8-300s have gone to the USA and are registered to Wells Fargo Bank.

We see a further increase this month in the number of gliders registered with two new ones from Jonker Sailplanes – these guys have got a real world-beater in this design, and there is an older Nimbus 2B (but not the Harry Potter broomstick!) that has also arrived.

There is however going to be some excitement in the next few months as Geotech Canada bring more of their AS350-B3s onto our register, but for use up in Africa. There are apparently six more to come. One of their Cessna Caravans and an AS350-B3 are included in this month’s register. I was talking to the Geotech people and they reckon we’ll be seeing the other aircraft soon – watch this space.

On the NTCA side there are two more Slings registered this month, showing just how successful this locally designed and built aircraft is becoming. Neither of these was registered to the manufacturer, but direct to their new owners, showing that these were built to order.

A noteworthy new arrival is the first Alpi Pioneer 330 Acro. This is a fully aerobatic version of the similar Hawk. It has been allocated an auspicious registration – ZU-FPI, which may cause confusion with our own ZS-FPI.

The overall register activity doesn’t seem to be slowing down much despite the Rand weakening. Twenty new ZS- registrations and fourteen ZU- registrations were added this month. The importation of used aircraft continues almost unabated showing that there are still many well-priced aircraft available elsewhere in the world and particularly from the USA.

Nine aircraft have been exported - which is an increase on the average. It is useful to see that three aircraft have been deleted as “crashed” and this means that the CAA is starting to clean up the register.

For those of us who like to know the date on which an aircraft was registered, I have had to leave this info off this month because at the time of writing it was not yet available. My apologies for this, but it was unavoidable due to deadlines.