Switzerland to publish list of unsafe airliners |
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Published
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Mon, 29 Aug 2005 06:50
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Bern: Switzerland is publishing a list of airlines prohibited from landing at Swiss airports because of safety concerns, the Swiss federal office for civil aviation (BAZL) said. The blacklist will be
available on the Internet on 1 September.
The European Commission is also intending to follow suit, while in the United States and the U.K. publishing similar blacklists is a norm.
BAZL said in a statement that such a blacklist of companies with systematic deficit is in the interest of security and transparency. The announcement came after a meeting between Swiss transport minister Moritz Leuenberger and his French counterpart Dominique Perben in Paris. France intends to come out with such a list shortly.
The move was welcomed by consumer activists in the country, saying such a move will offer travellers and travel agents with more integral information when bookings are made.
However, safety experts beg to differ. They say the move may not contribute to enhancing safety, but will do the opposite. They feel airlines could retain confidentiality under the old system when
reporting incidents or faults that would have compromised safety. When the blacklist system comes into force, the airlines will want to ensure that they are not in the list.
Aviation authorities in Switzerland had come under pressure to publish a blacklist of airlines which are not safe enough to travel as it was found that the jet which crashed in Egypt in January 2004 was one of more than 20 aircraft banned from Swiss airspace.
The French civil aviation authorities have decided to bring out a blacklist following the plane crash in Venezuela this month in which 152 French nationals died. In addition, there were two air crashes -- in Greece and Peru -- in the last two weeks, which killed more than 300 people.
In spite of the crashes and the bad publicity that was brought about, aviation experts feel flying is still safe. Even Swiss Federal Civil Aviation Office say flying today is as safe as it ever was, if not safer.
Statistics reveal that death toll as a result of air accidents is lower that that caused by driving, travelling by train or ship, or even taking a walk. During 2004, against 450 lives lost in air
travel-related accidents the world over, some 50,000 deaths are reported to have taken place in the European Union territory alone as a result of road accidents.
Anton Kohler, a spokesperson for the Swiss Federal Civil Aviation Office, also said public concerns that the low-cost airlines are compromising on safety is unfounded.
He said discount airlines in Switzerland, Europe and the United States are obliged to meet the same safety standards as other airlines. These standards were also applied to Cyprus-based Helios, whose plane crashed into a mountain near Athens on August 14, killing all on board. "At the SAFA checks, Helios came out well," he added. (SAFA, or Safety Assessment of Foreign Aircraft, is a programme of the Paris-based European Civil Aviation Conference (ECAC), which permits random inspections of foreign aircraft which land inside another country's territory.)
Besides the Swiss airlines, the Federal Civil Aviation Office also takes up advance inspections of 300 foreign airlines that flies to Switzerland, ensuring that these airlines have necessary national
authorisations, insurance cover and safety management systems. Only those airlines which meet all the criteria are given permit to fly for five years into Switzerland. There are 18 airlines or planes, which are now bared from flying into the country. Usually it will be the aircraft concerned which will be barred, but there are instances where the entire fleet of an airline are barred.
Meanwhile, the Cologne-based European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) is initiating steps to unifying all the air safety standards within Europe. The agency is also to decide on the certification of large passenger planes. Experts feel EASA will assume the role similar to that of the Federal Aviation Agency in the United States.
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