Air Tanzania’s blacklisting by the European Commission centres particularly on failure to maintain adequate control of its flight-training programme, and inability to understand the root causes behind safety deficiencies.
The carrier, whose fleet includes some of the latest aircraft types, applied for third-country operator authorisation from the European Union Aviation Safety Agency in August last year.
But EASA denied this authorisation in April, on safety grounds, and the Commission has banned Air Tanzania from European operations in its latest blacklist revision.
The Commission’s accompanying justification for the decision refers to a “lack of ability” by the airline to respond to identified safety deficiencies.
It specially highlights EASA’s concerns over flight training, and particularly whether the airline assured all types of emergencies and abnormal procedures – for airframe, engine or system malfunction, fires or other “critical” scenarios – featured within its recurrent pilot training.
“In view of the considerable number of serious deficiencies identified during its assessment, [EASA] determined that this situation indicates a systemic weakness within the air carrier that compromises safety and poses a serious hazard to flight operations,” it states.
Air Tanzania also submitted an “unacceptable” corrective action plan intended resolve the issues, says the Commission, prompting EASA to reject its third-country authorisation.
The Tanzania Civil Aviation Authority has also come under scrutiny. It provided information in June which revealed “significant shortcomings” in such areas as inspector allocation, generating concerns over the adequacy of resources with which to oversee airworthiness, flight operations and licensing.
Oversight procedures, the Commission adds, were “either incomplete or entirely absent in some critical areas”. Examination of certification and other activities indicated insufficient surveillance and inadequate follow-up on safety findings.
The regulator presented initiatives, during a technical meeting in October this year, to strengthen its oversight system, including development of performance-based surveillance plans, a comprehensive inspector-training system, and alignment of civil aviation regulations with ICAO standards.
Both Air Tanzania and the Tanzania Civil Aviation Authority were granted a hearing by the European air safety committee on 20 November.
While Air Tanzania presented its efforts to address the findings, including changes to operations manuals and development of an upset-recovery training plan, the committee remained unconvinced.
“It was observed that many of the root causes presented by the air carrier merely reiterated the findings, without performing a comprehensive analysis to identify the underlying systemic or procedural deficiencies,” says the Commission.
The carrier, it says, illustrated this by simply pointing to a number of lesser findings as the cause for more significant ones.
“This lack of a deeper examination weakens the effectiveness of the proposed corrective actions, as they address the symptoms rather than resolving the underlying systemic weaknesses,” it adds.
The civil aviation authority stated that, after EASA’s rejection of the airline’s third-country authorisation, it initiated a special audit which identified areas for improvement – including an ineffective safety-management system, personnel shortages, and other inefficiencies.
It also told the air safety committee that it established a team of inspectors to verify the airline’s plan for corrective action.
But the Commission states that claims regarding specific measures taken were “not substantiated by any evidence”, and doubts remain over the regulator’s root-cause analysis and, in turn, the effectiveness of its assessment of the airline’s corrective plan.
As a result, the Commission and EASA are intending to conduct an on-site visit to Tanzania in order to assess the regulatory and oversight situation. FlightGlobal has sought comment from the civil aviation authority.
