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For U.S., Europe and Asia, great distances between airline safety regulations
By Nicola Clark and Heather Timmons International Herald Tribune
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Despite the intense criticism that was heaped on the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration in Washington this month, regulators elsewhere say they still view the United States as the global standard bearer when it comes to rules for air safety and regulatory compliance. And while some regions have introduced additional layers of oversight in recent years, regulators note that U.S. air accident rates are the lowest in the world.
Safety records in Latin America and Africa are far and away the world's worst, with accident rates as high as six times the global average. In the Asia-Pacific region, where passenger traffic is growing fastest, regulation remains a patchwork ranging from shoddy to exemplary, depending on the country. Even in the European Union, where national regulators are held to account at the EU level, the number of accidents was still three times higher last year than in the United States.
So as the U.S. regulator's safety crackdown on American carriers led to thousands of flights being canceled, some observers overseas were puzzled by the uproar.
"It looks from here like an over-reaction," said Wolfgang Didszuhn, a retired Airbus vice president for airworthiness who is now a consultant to the air safety authority of the United Arab Emirates. "I don't think the FAA's image has suffered from this, but I do think everybody feels a bit sorry for them."
For European regulators, the recent U.S. crackdown brought to mind the crash, two years ago, of Helios Airways Flight 522. In that case, a Boeing 737-300 flying from Larnaca, Cyprus, to Prague, flew on autopilot for two hours, its pilots slumped unconscious over the controls, before plowing into a Greek hillside when it ran out of fuel. All 121 people aboard were killed.
A Greek government inquiry into that accident ultimately blamed maintenance technicians who had left the plane's pressurization system switched to manual rather than automatic - which led to a rapid loss of oxygen in the cabin. But the Cypriot aviation authority, which had had a reputation for cronyism before joining the European Union in 2004, was also criticized for "inadequate execution of its safety oversight responsibilities."
The airline, renamed Ajet Aviation, collapsed in 2006 amid a threat from the European Commission to ban it from the Continent's skies.
While the Helios tragedy could be viewed as an example of failed oversight, some airline industry regulators pointed to the subsequent crackdown by the EU as demonstrating the additional pressure that the European system can apply to fix any weak links.
"You could argue that national oversight at the time of the Helios crash was not rigorous enough," said Daniel Hoeltgen, a spokesman for the European Aviation Safety Agency, or EASA.
"But the initiative to assume power at the European level, and the political message that the commission was intent on banning the airline, worked. It showed that we had teeth."
There is no pan-Asian oversight board that inspects airlines, and old-fashioned, bureaucratic country regulators have often been slow to keep up with breakneck growth. Meanwhile, start-up budget airlines, often fueled with private equity, hedge fund and local stock market cash, are embarking on ambitious expansion plans that give regulation and inspection little thought.
A boom in passenger numbers - up 7.3 percent over all in Asia in the past year - has not been matched by a rise in skilled maintenance personnel, a rise in qualified inspectors, or an increase in regulatory stringency. As the Indian Aviation Ministry said in the 2007 year-end review of its own operations, "there is a mismatch in growing workload and the existing strength, resources and infrastructure."
Employees of state-owned airlines are paid poorly in many Asian countries, and government employees who serve as regulators are often paid less. "The problem is attracting the right people in the right place," said Torbjorn Karlsson, managing partner with the aerospace, military and aviation practice of Heidrick & Struggles in Singapore. "Governments need to give better incentives to these people," he said. Karlsson estimates that an engineer who jumps from a government regulator in some countries in Asia to an international aviation parts supplier like General Electric or Rolls-Royce can increase his salary tenfold.
In February, Giovanni Bisignani, the secretary general of the International Air Transport Association, called Asian security an "uncoordinated mess" and urged airlines to be more proactive. "Asia should be thinking of a regional security area with harmonized rules and tools using the best modern technology," he said at an aviation show in Singapore.
Bisignani this month also urged governments in Africa and Latin America to do more to improve their air safety records. Africa - where more than 40 people died last week in the crash of a DC-9 on takeoff from Goma, Congo - is the most unsafe region in the world for air travel, with one accident for every 244,000 flights, according to the air transport group. That is six times the global average of one accident for every 1.3 million flights.
In Latin America, where air accidents number one for every 600,000 flights, Bisignani bemoaned the lack of a common regulatory framework and noted that the International Civil Aviation Organization, an arm of the United Nations, had recently discovered 250 instances where Latin American regulators had fallen short of minimum international standards. "This is a dangerous embarrassment for the region," Bisignani said.
All countries sign up to the UN agency's guidelines, "but the truth is that not all countries live up to those standards and that is causing some concern," said Andrew Herdman, the director general of the Association of Asia Pacific Airlines, a 17-member industry trade group that includes some of the largest airlines in Asia.
EASA, created in 2003 and based in Cologne, has a mission focused on setting standards for air safety across the EU, which comprises 27 countries. It performs many of the policy-setting functions of the FAA in the United States, though it relies on national regulators of the EU member states to ensure its guidelines are followed and that the hundreds of maintenance directives and inspections that EASA orders each year are carried out by airlines.
EASA issued roughly 450 separate airworthiness directives to national regulators in 2007, of which 76 were in response to specific incidents, like the series of crash landings last year by Q400 commuter planes operated by Scandinavian Airlines.
"It's a system more or less based on the principle of mutual trust," Hoeltgen said, though since 2006 EASA has been conducting confidential audits of the national air regulators' compliance records at least once a year. The inspections, which last four to five days, normally also involve spot visits to a handful of airlines.
Hoeltgen said there had been a number of cases in recent years where either a national regulator or an airline had been out of compliance with EASA directives, though he declined to cite specific examples.
"In these cases, it has been up to the member state authority to design corrective action," he said. "They also have to convince us that this has been done properly."
National regulators say the second layer of oversight, rather than hindering their work, gives their inspectors added authority with airlines.
"It's EASA that issues the directives, and ultimately they have the final word," said Jonathan Nicholson, a spokesman for the Civil Aviation Authority in Britain. "Our job is to ask the airlines how they intend to meet EASA's requirements and then we verify that safety checks and maintenance have been done by auditing airline logbooks and making gate checks."
The possibility that carriers and regulators could face separate scrutiny from EASA's inspectors, he added, provided further incentive to comply or risk EU sanctions.
The turmoil in the United States was seen as a reaction to a long-term shift in the way the FAA oversaw U.S. airlines, from strict policing to a more collaborative approach that critics said went too far. Whistle-blowers at the FAA disclosed that they had been discouraged from cracking down on Southwest Airlines, and they found a sympathetic audience with Washington lawmakers.
That prodded the FAA to order an audit to check whether U.S. airlines were in compliance, a record penalty of $10.2 million against Southwest - and the grounding of thousands of flights, primarily from American Airlines.
Unlike the FAA, EASA does not have the authority to fine airlines or national regulators for noncompliance. Instead, the agency can notify the European Commission in Brussels, which has the power to take member states to court. A court ruling against a member state would result in all of its carriers losing their right to fly within the EU.
"This acts as pretty effective deterrent to lapses in oversight," Hoeltgen said.
Just one year ago, for example, Bulgaria - which joined the EU in January 2007 - stripped five freight airlines of their operating licenses in a bid to pre-empt a blanket EU ban on its carriers.
After a series of accidents and mishaps, the European Commission in July banned all 51 airlines from Indonesia, which has an especially poor safety record. Indonesia's fleet joined a blacklist of more than 90 airlines that included carriers from Liberia, Iran and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The United States has warned citizens against flying on Indonesian airlines, but the country has no direct flights to the United States.
Yet Indonesian carriers still fly freely into Asian and Middle East destinations, including Singapore, Hong Kong and Saudi Arabia. Garuda Indonesia, the country's flag carrier, has code-share agreements with Malaysia Airlines connecting Jakarta with Frankfurt, London and Manchester via Kuala Lumpur.
While the FAA's struggles have been followed closely, many regulators, airline executives and trade groups in Europe and Asia still view the U.S. regulator as a role model.
"You shouldn't need to have a regulator looking at every aircraft as it takes off or checking every turn of a screw by a maintenance person," said Nicholson of the British agency. "The regulator is the fallback. Ultimately, it is the airline's job to do what it has to do. When there are lapses, responsibility can only ever come back to the airline."
In Indonesia, regulators - in consultation with the FAA and other international safety bodies - seem to be aiming now for more stringency. Last month the country banned Adam Air, a low-cost carrier, from flying because of poor training of pilots and ground crews, and said it was passing new legislation related to airline safety.
Adam Air, which is run by a 27-year-old, Adam Suherman, and his brothers, has suffered several accidents, including a crash in January 2007 that killed all 102 passengers on board.
Of course, not all Asian airlines are in the same category. Carriers and regulators in Singapore and Australia have strong safety records and are often considered the region's best.
Singapore Airlines had an unbroken 28-year record of accident-free flying until a Singapore Airlines flight crashed during takeoff in Taiwan in 2000, killing 83.
Singapore's aviation authority audits local air operators twice a year, in addition to spot safety checks, and rotates inspectors so they cannot form cozy relationships with airlines they audit. Singapore Airlines says it follows manufacturers' maintenance instructions to the letter.
Australia's Civil Aviation Safety Authority has tightened up its auditing process in recent years, according to Peter Gibson, a spokesman. As well as keeping a database that it hopes will spot slippage in maintenance and safety standards, it has created a system of independent auditors.
Nicola Clark reported from Paris and Heather Timmons from New Delhi. Tim Johnston contributed reporting from Sydney.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/04/23/business/safety.php