Safety Records a Click Away
Matthew L. Wald, New York Times, 4/15/2007
African airlines have fatal accidents nine times more often than North American ones, and Asian and Latin American carriers are roughly six times deadlier than North American carriers. What can a traveler do to judge the safety of third world carriers?
Karen J. Hofman, a public health expert in Washington who travels often to Africa and Asia, says she is nervous about flying on LAM, the national airline of Mozambique, which a South African travel agent booked her on for a flight between Johannesburg and Maputo, Mozambique. She has never flown it before, and is concerned about its safety. So she looked it up on the Internet, and quickly found that because of safety problems, LAM was on a French government blacklist, and thus forbidden to fly to that country.
"I called my travel people in South Africa and I said, 'I'm really nervous,' " she said. "They said that particular flight from Johannesburg to Maputo would be O.K."
She plans to make the trip in July.
Last year, France took LAM off the blacklist, but the list itself has grown and morphed into a banned list now used by the whole European Union. It is quite specific, with some airlines banned from flying some planes into the region but allowed to fly others. For example, Pakistan International Airlines, known as PIA, is allowed to fly its Boeing 777's to Europe, but nothing else.
While it seems as if almost every big airliner that crashes anywhere in the world has an American or two aboard, the United States government avoids making any judgments about airlines that do not fly to this country, and does not monitor those that do as closely as it watches American carriers. But the ability of Americans to get a clue about the safety of foreign operators is growing.
The industry's trade group and cashier, the International Air Transport Association, told its 251 members in 2005 that to maintain their membership, they would have to submit to an extensive safety audit. Six carriers were kicked out for failure to initiate the audits by the end of 2006. The audits must be finished — and flaws corrected — by the end of next year, and officials expect to expel another half-dozen or so carriers then.
But almost all airlines should comply, because the organization provides vital commercial functions, like settling up between airlines when a passenger uses a ticket on one carrier to board the plane of another.
The safety audits involve five days of inspections by a six-member team. Any findings must be addressed, and there are follow-up audits.
The audit program was not created to allay (or confirm) the anxieties of passengers. Instead, it is supposed to save airlines money. American carriers cannot enter code-share agreements with foreign airlines unless those airlines have had safety audits. The Federal Aviation Administration will accept the new standardized audit, so a United States airline does not have to send its own people to do the job.
The international trade group lists the airlines that have a passing grade on a current audit at www.iata.org/ps/services/iosa/registry.htm. But it does not list the ones that failed.
The European Union's banned list is less comprehensive, because it covers only airlines that are judged not safe and that want to fly to Europe. An English-language version of the list is available at ec.europa.eu/transport/air-ban/list_en.htm. It names nearly 100 airlines, mostly African and some from Central Asia.
According to Douglas E. Lavin, the International Air Transport Association's vice president for North America, his group's audit is "an answer to the blacklist," as the European list is known. The blacklist does not give airlines the information they need to solve their problems, he said, and the audit program covers airlines that do not want to fly to Europe.
The Federal Aviation Administration is much less comprehensive, concerned only with airlines that fly to the United States. While it does occasional brief inspections of foreign planes landing in America, it does not rate airlines. Instead, it decides whether its counterparts in foreign governments have the resources necessary for effective oversight. It does not distinguish among airlines in those countries.
There are 20 countries on its list not meeting the F.A.A. standards, including Belize, Congo, Paraguay and Ukraine. The list is available at www.faa.gov/passengers/international_travel.
Knowing about an airline, of course, does not give complete information about the how safe a trip might be. Accidents can be caused by bad airports or air traffic control systems. And the biggest risk of accident in foreign travel may not be in the air at all, but on the streets or highways.
But the I.A.T.A. rating and the European blacklist offer clues.
"I do like that," said Dr. Hofman of the European list. "It's kind of like a Moody's bond rating, for airlines."