Indonesia’s Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has grounded government-owned Riau Airlines because its manager of operations and chief pilot both resigned and the airline was unable to fill the vacancies.
Riau Airlines managing director Heru Nurhayadi says the airline received a letter from the DGCA on 26 July informing the carrier it had 72hr to ground its entire operations.
Heru says the DGCA’s move to suspend the airline’s AOC so quickly is unwarranted because Indonesian law stipulates that the DGCA must first give carriers three months of warnings.
He says the airline “was doing good… We don’t have any accidents and we’re not a start-up airline”.
DGCA director of airworthiness and certification office, Yurlis Hasibuan, and DGCA deputy director flight standards, Diding Sunardi, were both unavailable for comment yesterday and today.
Heru says he has already found a new operations manager but the DGCA has rejected the candidate for chief pilot, insisting this position be filled by a pilot who is type-rated on the aircraft that the airline operates.
Riau Airlines is one of the Asia-Pacific’s largest Fokker 50 operators with a fleet of five aircraft. Heru says on 21 August it is also due to receive two BAE Systems Avro RJ100s.
Several small regency governments in Indonesia’s Riau province own the airline which mostly operates on routes linking Riau province with other parts of Indonesia and neighbouring Malaysia.
The fact it can no longer operate means thousands of people, living in some of the most remote parts of Indonesia, no longer have any air service and must resort to time-consuming trips by boat.
Heru says today there will be a shareholders’ meeting where he will discuss the grounding, adding that he does not know why the chief pilot and manager of operations resigned and left before the carrier could find replacements.
He says last year the carrier tripled its annual profits to 9 billion rupiah ($990,000) from 3 billion rupiah.
In recent months the DGCA has suspended the AOCs of several other Indonesian carriers in an effort to improve the country’s air safety standards. This comes at a time when Indonesia is trying to allay the European Union’s safety concerns and get the EU to lift its ban on Indonesian carriers.
Source: Air Transport Intelligence news
Source: Flight International
