There are good systems for forcing careless airlines to improve their safety, but the most potent motivator is traveller choice
The Flash Airlines accident at Sharm el Sheikh in Egypt has had a side-effect that may be positive for air transport safety. It is sad that crashes like this one have always been the greatest motivators for aviation safety advancement, but although the 1990s brought some welcome proactive safety studies and initiatives, it seems still to be true.
In this case it has been the media - not always a good influence on aviation safety - that since the Sharm el Sheikh incident has discovered and prised up the lid on a confidential system of aviation safety checks. The media discovered that, in 2002, Switzerland banned Flash Airlines from its airports for persistent safety violations. Since then, France, which lost 133 of its citizens in the accident, says it was informed about the Swiss ban and carried out spot checks on Flash Airlines aircraft, but found them compliant with International Civil Aviation Organisation standards.
The system of checks, known as the safety assessment of foreign aircraft (SAFA), is operated by the 41 European Civil Aviation Conference (ECAC) countries and is a force for good as it stands. It is an effective system of safety spot-checks on aircraft, both from ECAC member countries and outside. But it could be much more effective if its activities and findings were fully transparent instead of partially transparent as they are now.
The SAFA system is definitely active: in 2002 there were 3,234 inspections of 532 operators from 115 states, involving 170 aircraft types or sub-types, according to the report on the ECAC website. It also reveals that carriers most likely to be found at fault in inspections come from Africa, the Middle East and North/Central America and the Caribbean. But among all the dry data ECAC supplies in its SAFA report, it does not name the individual states nor carriers that were found at fault or - more importantly - persistent offenders.
This is a traditional system of confidentiality, related to diplomacy and states' sovereign rights, which is beginning to look increasingly out of date in today's globally trading world, particularly in aviation. These violations are not the type for which there is a justification forconfidentiality, like airlines operating their own internal incident reporting systems designed to enable them to recognise potential safety issues and deal with them before they doany harm. These are airlines found by an independent agency to be breaking ICAO standards and recommended practices, or being careless.
What looks like proof of SAFA's effectiveness is there to see. After its first year in operation - 1996 - the violations found per inspection dropped dramatically. So the deterrent effect worked immediately. The trouble is that, since then, the figures have remained almost level. This suggests that whatever good the system does, SAFA has gone as far as it will go in its level of effectiveness.
SAFA, and systems like it, have more than one purpose. To deter those who would transgress, to detect those who do, and to act against those found to be persistent offenders. All this is done on behalf of the travelling public, other airline customers, and third parties who might be hurt if an accident occurs. But there is another way of protecting the travelling public: to let people know which airlines violate safety rules persistently so they can avoid using them. This allows the public to protect themselves, and acts as a tremendously powerful commercial deterrent to carriers that hoped they could get away with carelessness.
Not to allow the public access to information gathered, and action taken, on their behalf is stunning arrogance on the part of the civil servants and politicians who insist on keeping the data from them. Unfortunately, this practice remains endemic among those in most countries' administrations. The information that they have gathered belongs to the people they serve, especially when it has nothing to do with national security.
UK transport minister Alistair Darling prised open the SAFA box a little more when, last week, he announced which countries and airlines had been banned from air transport operations to the UK. That is a good start, but only a beginning, because UK travellers do not know which airlines are banned by other countries. That means if they fly between points abroad they have no idea whether they are flying with an airline that has been found violating safe practices. But if ECAC were to make its SAFA reports fully transparent, travellers from many countries could make their own choices, and careless airlines would be forced by consumer power to pull their socks up.
Source: Flight International
