Prevention and cure

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Numerous recent aircraft crashes has put operational safety on the sector's radar.

Over the last 10 years, air accident rates have improved by 49%, but since July 2007, there have been seven fatal air crashes across the globe. While the Middle East region boasts an impressive safety record, the Asia/Pacific region saw an increase in its accident rate, particularly in Indonesia, and Africa is an area where action is needed to further improve accident rates.

Despite a recent drop in the price of fuel, industry critics are saying that airlines are cutting back on costs, which is to the detriment of maintenance checks, so how are airline safety requirements monitored?

According to Guenther Matschnigg, senior vice president of safety, operations and infrastructure for the International Air Transport Association (IATA), almost half of accidents in 2007 took place during landing.

In September of last year, 88 people died as an aircraft landed in Phuket and two months earlier a Tam Airways plane exploded after touch down in Sao Paulo.

"Most accidents occur in the landing/approach phase and what we call the runway excursion," says Matschnigg. "This is either due to wrong decision-making, not doing the go-around, the runway itself or the training of pilots," Matschnigg says.

IATA's 2007 Safety Report states that most accidents can be prevented by the initiation of a timely go-around. Air crew require additional training to improve the go-around decision-making process throughout the approach to landing, as well as to improve carrying out the go-around itself, but IATA believes this exercise should become an integral part of an airline's culture.

"We have developed a runway excursion prevention programme, which will be ready for airlines to use by the end of the year," explains Matschnigg. "This has not just been developed by IATA, but by experts too, and we hope to include this programme into our standards once it has been proven."

Existing programmes such as IATA's Operational Safety Audit (IOSA) is the first global standard for airline operational safety auditing. Any airline wishing to join IATA must first complete IOSA.

In 2006, six members were removed from IATA membership for failing to contract an audit and the same number again were removed in 2007. IATA estimates that audits avoided have resulted in industry savings of US$56.9 million.

Technical issues are linked to the majority of air accidents and in 2007 maintenance issues contributed to almost 20% of all occurrences. IATA suggests that airlines need to uphold proper safety assurance of maintenance activities, whether these are run in-house or as an outsourced function.

"Both ways have been proven to work and there are advantages to both," admits Matschnigg. "Whether you out-source your maintenance activities or not depends on the structure of the airline."

"It makes sense to out-source certain heavy maintenance operations, particularly if your fleet is small. If you have lots of aircraft then in-house maintenance is more feasible."

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