Airlines Banned in EU: Who Is Checking If Your Airline is Safe?

Slutsky Maxim/ITAR-TASS Photo/Corbis
aircraft of the Utair airlines near Tyumen
Even though the crash of a Russian airliner in Siberia last week continues a pattern of disasters in that country involving aging airplanes, poor maintenance, and sloppy regulation, there are other parts of the world where boarding a flight is more risky. For example, the Philippines and Africa.
The European Union has just updated its blacklist of airlines and continues a blanket ban on all carriers from the Philippines. It also lists scores of African airlines, where the worst record is held by the Republic of Congo.
However, these two black spots send very different messages about what is wrong.
In Africa, a combination of political corruption, civil wars, numerous rogue carriers, airplanes at the end of their life cycles, and no continent-wide safety culture means that there won’t be improvements any time soon.
The Philippines, on the other hand, shows what happens when a potentially rich market is opened up to carriers following western budget-airline business models without the infrastructure to support them.
You end up with a kind of Potemkin Village on the runway: new airplanes, splashy logos, and snappily dressed flight attendants masking serious deficiencies like negligent regulators and an acute shortage of experienced pilots.
And worse: aircrew taking drugs. In February, a pilot of Lion Air, a major Indonesian carrier, was arrested for possession of crystal meth; in the past eight months, three other Lion Air pilots have been arrested on drugs charges, and a flight attendant who went public with charges of pilots regularly taking drugs said she received death threats.
Although Lion Air is on the European blacklist, another major Indonesian carrier, Garuda, has met the European standards—having been forced, after a series of crashes, to pass a rigorous review.
There is clearly an urgent need for a worldwide standard to determine when an airline should be banned for safety reasons.
The two most rigorous regulators, the European Union and the FAA in the U.S., use very different methods. Europe bans airlines, the U.S. bans countries.
But they share no common or consistent standard.
For example, while Europe has the total ban on the Philippines, the FAA allows Philippine Airlines (PAL) to fly into the U.S. but remains skeptical of efforts made by the Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines to clean up its act. Carriers from the Philippines are under the FAA’s Category 2 watch, which means that they can fly existing routes into the U.S. but not add either routes or change to larger airplanes and are subject to heightened surveillance.
The latest European blacklist, meanwhile, for the first time includes the Venezuelan airline Conviasa, cited for a record of accidents and safety issues raised after checks of the airplanes made at European airport.
And in an unusual step, Libya, where the airline infrastructure has yet to recover from the civil war, has agreed with European regulators not to resume flying into European airports until at least late November. Technically, this is not a ban and, in any case, Libyan Airlines seems able to circumvent this agreement by leasing an airplane from a European carrier—complete with a crew and including maintenance resources—and fly to London, Vienna, Athens, and Rome.
What should the concerned traveler take away from this far from perfect system?
As long as you book a flight on an airline operating out of the U.S., you can be sure it has passed an FAA safety audit. But if that flight connects to an airline not operating in the U.S., you will need to check the far more extensive blacklist published by the Europeans. Even then, the E.U. only has power to ban airlines flying into European air space, which leaves hundreds of airlines that are not caught in either of these two safety regimes.
So what we have here is a global business without effective global oversight. One body that is supposed to be global in its powers, the International Civil Aviation Organization, ICAO, like other United Nations agencies, is hidebound by bureaucracy and international political sensitivities.
In contrast, the European Union’s blacklist reflects a political culture that is aggressive (and, many would argue, too intrusive) on all consumer-protection issues to a degree that would be impossible in the U.S. And in the U.S. the FAA’s technical staff, no matter how skilled and dedicated, are limited in their powers by political appointees who are notoriously susceptible to industry pressures.
Correction: An earlier version of this story stated that Lion Air was a carrier out of the Philippines. It is an Indonesian airline.
DENPASAR, Indonesia — An Indonesian plane carrying 101 passengers broke in two after missing the runway at Bali airport Saturday and landing in the sea, leaving dozens injured but no fatalities.
The new Boeing 737-800 was operated by budget airline Lion Air, a rapidly expanding carrier which recently sealed blockbuster orders for hundreds of new planes but which is banned from US and European airspace over safety concerns.
The domestic flight ended with passengers screaming in terror as the aircraft hit the water after missing the runway at the popular resort island’s Denpasar airport, despite fine weather.
The plane, which was delivered to Lion Air just last month, came to rest partially submerged not far from the end of the runway, with inflatable slides deployed from the front exits and a gaping crack in the fuselage towards the rear.
Passengers in life jackets could be seen in the water as police in rubber dinghies rowed out from the shore.
“The plane plunged into the sea at high speed,” said passenger Ignatius Juan Sinduk, 45, from his hospital bed in Denpasar where he was being treated for breathing difficulties after his chest was injured in the crash.
“Everybody screamed and water suddenly surged into the plane. Passengers panicked and scrambled for life jackets. Some passengers fell, some ran into others, it was chaos.
“I managed to grab one (a lifejacket) and slowly swam out of the plane and to the shore.”
Dewa Made Indra, local head of the national disaster agency, said that 52 people were taken to hospitals after the crash. Forty-four had since been discharged and eight remained in four different hospitals on the island, he said.
A hospital doctor said one female passenger had suffered a life-threatening brain haemorrhage.
Worried relatives gathered at the head office of Lion Air in Jakarta. They included Masriyah, who like many Indonesians goes by one name and whose 19-year-old daughter was a stewardess on the plane.
“I called her hundreds of times but she didn’t answer her phone. I need to know whether she is okay,” she said, with tears running down her cheeks.
Bali is a hugely popular holiday destination, welcoming millions of foreign tourists from around the world every year.
Three foreigners were on board the Lion Air flight when it crashed at around 3:00 pm (0700 GMT) — a Frenchman, a Singaporean woman and a Singaporean man, according to the airport’s head of communications.
Transport ministry official Herry Bhakti initially said the plane overshot the runway, but later clarified his comments to say it landed straight in the water. Officials said they were still determining exactly why it ditched.
Lion Air’s general affairs director, Edward Sirait, said the aircraft was arriving from the city of Bandung in West Java province with 101 passengers — 95 adults, five children and a baby — and seven crew members on board.
“The plane broke into two pieces,” he said.
He said the plane was delivered to Lion Air in Indonesia on March 18, adding it had come “straight from the factory” and started operations a week later.
The pilot had flown for Lion Air for six years and was fit to fly, Sirait added. The airline has been randomly drug testing its crews since several pilots were arrested in recent years for possession and consumption of crystal meth.
The little-known carrier launched 13 years ago with just one plane but has in recent times struck two of the world’s largest aircraft orders in a staggering $46 billion bet on Indonesia’s air transport boom.
France announced last month that Indonesia’s fastest-growing airline had agreed to buy 234 medium-haul A320 jets worth $23.8 billion (18.2 billion euros) from European aerospace giant Airbus.
That came after Lion Air astounded the industry with a $22.4 billion deal for 230 Boeing 737 airliners, inked in 2011 during a visit to Indonesia by US President Barack Obama.
But experts have raised concerns that the airline’s rapid growth could put safety at risk, with some pointing out that there is a lack of qualified pilots in Indonesia to fly the fast-increasing number of planes.
Copyright © 2013 AFP. All rights reserved. More »
2 comments:
Anonymous said…
Like you I interviewed many of the investigators on TWA800, in my case for the UK Channel 4 doc series Black Box, which we were doing the initial research on when this tragedy occurred. Yes, the FBI was all over it, yes they tried to bully their way in, but as you say that’s their MO. From the off, however, they had concluded, like many NTSB and other investigators I phoned on the day and the days after the explosion, that the best theory to fit the known facts was a bomb. Yet the real facts weren’t yet known, and that would be a working theory until more and better facts came along and evidence either supported it or knocked it out. They eventually concluded that it was a fuel explosion and there was no evidence of a bomb explosion, and they had to move heaven and earth to prevent the FBI publicly announcing it was a bomb. One of my NTSB interviewees was talking of being on the phone to the FBI with them all hot to trot for an instant press conference announcing a bomb while he explained the different explosive properties of chemicals. The FBI were not covering up anything; what they were doing, maybe equally reprehensibly, was rushing to the conclusion that an act of terrorism was responsible. If not restrained by the cooler heads in the NTSB, with whom they did have a turf war over the investigation, they would have rushed to judgement and eventually been made to look very foolish. It was a case of Washington bureaucracies colliding; for some in the FBI, the bomb theory was the key to being in on a big big investigation that could make a lot of people’s careers, and for that reason they clung to it far too long.
As for the other ‘theories’ surrounding TWA800, what tosh! Your fine book had all that was known then, and though it took ages and ages to come out (not Boeing’s finest hour, IMO) the spark from the scavenge pump in an exceptionally overheated tank had to be the culprit. If I had a buck for all the nonsensical conspiracy theories I heard back then. The ‘missile theory’ was the most enduring, and that and the other crazy stuff that I could barely believe the human mind was capable of that was then proliferating on the web turned out to be something of a dress rehearsal for the plague of web-based conspiratorial lunacy post 9/11. There’s so much more to say about this, and so little time. I haven’t seen the film, but would like to, so I am not dumping on it until then — unless of course they are going with the missile theory. Best to you and yours, Christine, Andy Weir
Jim Blaszczak said…
The truth is all we ask, because, like you, those of us interested in aviation safety do “give a shit.”
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