Air Transport

During December the International Air Transport Association took an unexpected step that will almost certainly accelerate the industry’s attempts to whip into line airlines in nations with lower safety standards. The established IATA Operational Safety Audit (IOSA) is going to become a condition for IATA membership within two years. Airlines that fail the IOSA will lose their membership status. IOSA was originally designed as a voluntary audit, although IATA pitched it for approval by major aviation agencies like the US Federal Aviation Administration (it is FAA-recognised) to use as a tool for checking the operational standards of an airline or its foreign codeshare partners.

The association’s safety and operations chief, Gunther Matschnigg, says that IATA airline passengers have a right to expect that its member carriers meet or exceed International Civil Aviation Organisation standards. Some states have approached IATA for briefings on IOSA with a view to using it as a tool to check airline standards, says Matschnigg, identifying Egypt, Jordan and Turkey.

As the air transport market has become globally more liberalised and competitive, passengers have unprecedented choice of who to fly with, so a reputation for safety has become more of a commercial asset. Winning IATA’s stamp of safety approval may become attractive, especially given the public and media interest in the concept of public airline “blacklists”. Being “whitelisted” could become a marketing tool. The low-cost scheduled carriers – which currently have good safety records – all choose not to be IATA members, so they would not face direct pressure to use IOSA. Only time will tell whether travellers will choose the price tag before a safety tag.