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Cyprus in air safety spotlight
By George Psyllides
ICAO audits ‘placed island in bottom 30 in the world’
CYPRUS ranked among the 30 most criticised countries in ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organisation) audit programmes carried out in 111 countries between 1998 and 2004, according to a French Parliamentary report on airline safety.
The 30 have never been named by the ICAO, which argues its programme depends on the co-operation of member states and the understanding that they will not end up on a black list.
The French report, published in July 2004, was the result of a fact-finding mission on airline safety carried out by French MP Odile Saugues; it received little attention until Le Monde picked up the story this week in the wake of the Helios and Venezuela air crashes last week.
The report concludes that the ICAO has insufficient powers, merely drawing minimal standards that are not binding and have to be transposed in the various countries.
The ICAO launched an audit programme of civil aviation authorities in 1998; this showed that 30 out of the 111 countries audited did not sufficiently comply with these standards to ensure acceptable level of control over the safety of aircraft and airlines registered in their countries.
“Some countries do not have the funds or the political determination to ensure such a level of safety,” the French report said.
Faced with the ICAO’s refusal to the 30 “critical” countries, the French parliamentary report drew up its own list, based on the 111 summary reports released by ICAO to national governments. The full reports remain confidential. Cyprus was on that list, together with countries such as Papua New Guinea and Mongolia.
“For Cyprus, which was the subject of two audits, the rate of deficiencies was 60.23 per cent during the first mission, only falling to 46.57 per cent during the follow-up mission,” the French Parliamentary report said.
The strongest criticism from the ICAO audit for Cyprus concerned “legislation, technical personnel and the obligations of continuous supervision.”
This compared with deficiency rates of about 30 per cent, falling to 4 per cent for Poland, Lithuania, Estonia and Slovakia, new EU member states like Cyprus.
Even Hungary, which was also in the unofficial black list of 30, managed to bring down its rate of deficiencies from 41.53 per cent to 23.73 per cent between the two audits.
Europe’s attempt to harmonise safety regulations still needed to be perfected, the report added.
“This harmonisation has been largely carried out across Europe with the European Civil Aviation Conference (ECAC), the Joint Aviation Authorities (JAA) and Eurocontrol; 40 or so countries having accepted non-binding joint rules in many fields.”
In particular, the ECAC adopted the safety assessment of foreign aircraft – SAFA – programme in 1996, which provided for inspections of foreign aircraft from foreign countries in a bid to compensate for insufficient inspections in some countries.
“But these approximately half-hour ramp inspections are limited to visual inspection of aircraft or flight documents and cannot replace continuous technical supervision,” the report said.
The report pointed out that the harmonisation did not prevent the persistence of weaknesses in some European countries: Greece for instance only a few weeks before the Olympic Games, Portugal, Cyprus, Hungary and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.
The 10 new European Union member-states swiftly raised the level of inspections but were still “the subject of specific oversight to make up for their lagging behind”, the findings report said.
The list of 30 countries was: Albania, Mali, Belize, Mongolia, Belarus, Mozambique, Botswana, Myanmar, Burkina Faso, Niger, Cambodia, Uganda, Cameroon, Palau (Pacific Ocean) Papua New Guinea, Cyprus, Croatia, Portugal, Ghana, Russia, Guyana, Samoa, Hungary, Senegal, Kenya, Togo, Laos, Tonga, FYROM, Vanuatu (Pacific Ocean).