A MASSIVE deterioration in freight airline safety in the CIS countries has given the region its worst fatal airline-accident rate in history, according to figures released by the Interstate Aviation Committee (MAK). Ten of the year's 13 fatal accidents involved CIS-registered freighters. MAK says that this gives a fatal-accident rate of 3.5 per 100,000 flights - more than double the previous worst rate, which occurred in 1994.
Rudolf Teimurazov, MAK's chairman of the Commission of Flight Safety, attributes the 13 major fatal accidents primarily to four factors: industry deregulation, ageing aircraft, poor maintenance standards and poor loading, including overloading.
The total number of on-board deaths was 292. The figures do not take account of the 300 people killed on the ground by a wet-leased Antonov An-32 when it overran the runway at Kinshasa, Zaire, following an abandoned take-off, and two people killed on the ground near Turin Airport in Italy, when an Aeroflot-Russian International Airlines Antonov An-124 crashed during a go-around from a poor approach. Teimurazov has said that the collapse of CIS freighter safety is cause for "considerable concern".
One of the factors for anxiety, says Teimurazov, is the number of "crew" on board some of the cargo flights. In three accidents to Ilyushin Il-76s, which are supposed to have a maximum crew of six, there were respectively 21, 29 and 37 people on board.
Among the three fatal accidents to passenger aircraft, only one, with five deaths, involved a scheduled passenger flight, says the MAK: this was a Tyumenaviatrans Yakovlev Yak-40 which landed on a helicopter ramp at Khanti-Mantisk in bad weather at night.
The worst single event for on-board fatalities, however, was to the chartered Vnukovo Airlines Tupolev Tu-154 which suffered a controlled-flight-into-terrain accident on approach to Longyearbyen Airport, Spitzbergen, Norway, in August, killing all 141 people on board.
The third of the fatal passenger flights involved a Komi-Avia Antonov An-2, which crashed in November, killing 14 of the 15people on board.
Source: Flight International
