In October 1996, when Capt Tore Granaas heard the news of a third Boeing 757 crash in Latin America in less than a year, he felt that something had to be done. The Latin American/Caribbean area as a whole does not have a good safety reputation.
There are other regions of which the same can be said, but Granaas, director of operations for the International Air Transport Association (IATA), reacted by making South America the location for a new kind of regional-safety seminar. IATA's action could, arguably, be seen as evidence of a growing industry belief that the time is now right to move globally on the issue of regional air-safety differences, and to try new ideas. Like most good ideas, this one was simple: there was no attendance charge at the seminar. Moreover, it worked.
Ironically, even though two of the three operators involved in the 757 accidents were not based in Latin America, they seem to have been the trigger for an event which may turn out to be a safety-culture milestone for that continent and, perhaps, to show the way for other operators, such as those based in Africa.
The first 757 fatal accident was to the American Airlines controlled-flight-into-terrain (CFIT)crash at Cali, Colombia, in December 1995. Turkish carrier Birgenair had suffered the second, offshore Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic, in February 1996, with faulty airspeed indications probably caused by a partially blocked pitot tube; and, finally, in October, an Aero Peru 757 crashed into the sea with its airspeed and pressure-altimeter sensors disabled by adhesive tape over its static vents (Flight International, Airline Safety Review 1996, 15-21 January, P31).
Granaas had reacted, as did the industry, to the shock of seeing the 757's previously spotless 14-year safety record not only breached, but decimated. That was not all, however: combined with Peru-based Faucett Airlines' Boeing 737 CFIT crash on approach to Arequipa, Peru, and six regional-carrier fatal accidents in the Latin America/Caribbean area at that point in 1996, the situation was taken as a call to action.
Regional differences
Granaas co-ordinated IATA's October 1996 Human Factors Seminar in Warsaw, Poland (Flight International, 13-19 November, 1996, P30), which had been productive, but disappointing in one vital respect: the hoped-for strong representation from Eastern European and Western CIS airlines did not materialise at the Warsaw venue, which had been chosen with them in mind. The many reasons for this can only be guessed at, but fees, in the form of attendance fees on top of travel and accommodation costs, were judged to have been a factor.
At that time, plans were in place for IATA's Safety Committee to meet in February 1997 and Granaas was looking for a venue. Normally, these meetings are for committee members only, but Granaas and IATA safety specialist Capt Renee Marques, also director of safety at Aerovias Nacionales de Colombia (Avianca), decided that, if it were to combine the Safety Committee event with a regional-safety seminar, it might be possible to waive attendance fees. Marques suggested Colombia, and Avianca president Dr Gustavo Lenis agreed, offering to sponsor a seminar in Cartagena.
The response was dramatic. About 100 delegates were expected, but more than twice that number actually booked and even more attended on a day-by-day basis. By contrast with Warsaw - where only LOT Polish Airlines was well represented from the region - at Cartagena, attendance registers show that 94 delegates from the Latin American/Caribbean area attended, representing 29 airlines from 14 countries, plus representatives from Colombia's Aeronautica Civil, and a fair number of Colombian military aircrew.
Part of the phenomenon
Avianca, which already has a seat on IATA's human-factors working group, was just one element of the phenomenon, although its part was clearly significant. Lenis opened the event, and all Avianca group aircrew, cabin crew and operations personnel who were not on duty were required to attend. In practice, this meant that more than 30 from the flag carrier and its subsidiaries, SAM Colombia and Helicol, were there. Colombia's civil-aviation authority chief, Dr Abel Jimenez, contributed as a speaker.
Safety organisations, including the Flight Safety Foundation (FSF), are aware that, at their conferences, they are normally preaching almost entirely to the converted. There are 185 contracting states in the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO), but, at the November 1996 Dubai annual safety conference of the FSF, IATA and the International Federation of Airworthiness, Pakistan International Airlines' Capt Amjad Faizi, in a presentation on Third-World safety, remarked that only 40 nations were represented there (Flight International, 8-14 January, P28).
Reaction from the Cartagena seminar organisers and participants has been enthusiastic. Granaas says that he was "-most impressed" by the response from Latin American/ Caribbean area airlines. Seminar speaker Pat Andrews, presenting the early results from the IATA/FSF approach and landing accident reduction (ALAR) team, reports that she was "overwhelmed" by the level of interest in the ALAR's work shown by local area delegates.
British Airways' Capt Jeremy Butler, chairman of IATA's Human Factors Group, says that the consensus among the Association's safety groups is that there is evidence of "-a move by Third World and developing-economy nations to become more safety conscious", but that, so far, it is still "patchy" - in Latin America, as well. Varig of Brazil and Avianca are seen particularly as having "pro-active" safety cultures.
Influential IATA members believe that there is no sign that any detectable increase in safety awareness is extending yet to Africa, which has the worst of all a long-term safety record. They say that they are happy, however, with what China appears to be achieving. After more than a decade in which at least one fatal accident occurred in China every year, China has now seen two years free of serious accidents, possibly because of the Government's policy to slow down tearaway growth to a pace which allows training and the infrastructure to keep pace.
Cartagena may not be the only evidence so far of a will to improve. At the FSF's February 1996, Moscow, Russia, CFIT seminar, attendance by CIS airline delegates, regulators and air-traffic-control staff, amounted to some 150-200. The FSF judged the level of interest shown in the subject to be "unprecedented".
In the remaining ten months of 1996, however, simple figures depicting CIS domestic and overseas wet-lease fatal accidents painted a dismal picture, particularly in the cargo arena: seven CIS-registered cargo flights were involved in fatal accidents at home or overseas. In addition, there were three regional-airline fatal accidents and the tragic CFIT accident to a chartered Vnukovo Airlines Tupolev Tu-154 on approach to Longyearbyen, Spitzbergen, northern Norway. So, even if the seeds of a safety culture were shown to be germinating at Moscow, they have to be spread more widely to bear significant fruit.
If there is a real - even slight - groundswell of safety-consciousness being generated in those regions which particularly need it, it is important to identify the motivation so as to keep the trend going.
Butler believes that the USA's International Aviation Safety Assessment Programme (IASAP), which gives grades to states according to the effectiveness or otherwise of their national aviation authority's safety-oversight programmes, has had a beneficial effect. Describing it as "a stick, rather than carrot, approach", Butler says that, for an airline from any state to be banned from the USA, or to have its flights there subjected to Federal Aviation Administration special surveillance, has "-extended the safety argument upwards from the operations department to the commercial decision makers", many of whom had not seen safety or operational standards as being their territory.
The European Civil Aviation Conference countries, led by the European Union, are developing their version of the USA's IASAP, which concentrates on identifying substandard operations by airlines flying into their own airports, and applying sanctions - such as grounding the aircraft - until corrections are seen to be made. This makes passengers use the competitor next time, gains the airline bad publicity and, finally, can be seriously disruptive to scheduling. Again, the top managers are being forced to appreciate that acceptable international operational standards cannot be achieved by an operations or engineering department which has been starved of funds.
REACTION FROM THE TOP
The International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) has 185 member states, and has to work on consensus. ICAO's chief, Assad Kotaite, is not known for acting until consensus appears to be a realistic, feasible, goal, but in February he publicly called for the contracting states to give ICAO both the power and the means to carry out audits of national air-transport standards (Flight International, 5-11 March, P9).
Such ICAO standards checks should be an "accepted norm", says Kotaite, presumably a plea for nations not to see them as an affront to their own competence and put up barriers against them. He makes the point that such checks would not infringe on national sovereignties. Kotaite's unspoken point, given his record as one who does not rock boats, is that a world which is more "safety conscious" is finally ready for such a proposition.
Meanwhile, Granaas says that IATA is preparing for an aviation human-factors seminar in February 1998, the location to be "in the Far East". Next stop Africa?
Source: Flight International
