Finally, the figures for the number of unsafe "foreign" aircraft landing at Europe's airports have been published. This is an excellent start, but only a start. The information assembled could - and hopefully will - be used to much greater effect than it is now.
The report is almost more remarkable, unfortunately, for what it does not say than for what it does.
The Safety Assessment of Foreign Aircraft (SAFA) scheme is relatively new. It was set up in 1996 and did not really become operational in the field until the following year. It was not until Europe saw the USA's International Aviation Safety Assessment (IASA) programme in operation, and could see that the now-implemented plan for the International Civil Aviation Organisation to carry out national safety audits was firmly on the rails, that the always slow, timid, traditional and cautious Europeans decided to do something themselves. SAFA was the result, and it has huge potential to improve airline safety among all the carriers - both Europe-based and "foreign" - which use European airports.
The ICAO and US systems are "top down" checks. They audit a state's capacity to carry out its ICAO-defined safety oversight and enforcement duties, and its actual performance in doing it. SAFA is a "bottom up" check. Inspectors go direct to the front line - airport ramps - to check out the ultimate product of effective safety oversight: the aircraft and flight crew themselves. It works because the discovery of a series of unsafe aircraft registered in the same state is a health check on its national safety oversight system, as well as enabling the aircraft to be grounded if the deficiencies are serious enough to warrant it.
SAFA's work, however, needs to be more standardised. ECAC has already identified that there are "substantial variations from one State to another" in filing reports. Some states, the ECAC report says, carry out fewer but more targeted inspections yielding large quantities of data, others undertake many inspections at a more cursory level.
It does not, however, say which states these are or what it plans to do about standardisation.
In fact there are many things that the report does not say. It reveals that 58% of all checks carried out were on ECAC-registered aircraft, and the remaining 42% on non-ECAC aeroplanes. This may demonstrate admirable fairness and thoroughness, but it does not say which group produces the larger number of deficient aircraft or unlicensed pilots.
There are a few ECAC countries which give details of which airlines or states of registration feature most prominently as safety-deficient in their SAFA inspections, but most refuse any detail. ECAC itself refuses to provide any.
It is continually surprising how governments and civil servants forget for whom they are doing their work and why. SAFA's immediate task may be to gather data, monitor the safety oversight of individual states and to ground unsafe aircraft until they are repaired, but this is not an end in itself. The purpose is to make travel safer for the public, who are the same people whose taxes fund organisations like ECAC and the JAA.
ECAC has made a start in publishing some bald figures about what faults SAFA is revealing, but no attempt is being made to provide information about who the miscreant airlines are so that the travelling public can make up their own minds about which airline to travel with.
Withholding this information from the public is unreasonable, arrogant and smacks of a "teacher knows best" attitude to the people on behalf of whom SAFA was set up.
This is true just as much at a national as at the ECAC level. The information gathered during the SAFA inspections programme should be put in the public domain immediately it is known so that those who are making a decision about which airline to use to fly from their local airport can do so on safety as well as cost or schedule grounds.
Finally, and crucially important, "naming and shaming" airlines is a far more effective way of enforcing safety than diplomatic exchanges between nations.
Source: Flight International
