Taiwan seeks place at ICAO table for safety
The ‘One China’ policy is behind delays to nation’s attempts to become part of UN body
After 42 years at Taiwan’s Civil Aeronautics Administration, the 38th triennial general assembly of Montreal’s International Civil Aviation Organization that began Tuesday is the very first one Jean Shen is attending.
Odd, considering ICAO oversees rules and regulations on issues like safety, security and the environment applied by the world’s civil aeronautics agencies, and Taiwan’s 23 million people ranks it 50th of the world’s 238 countries. Blame geopolitics. Taipei lost its seat at the United Nations and its affiliated bodies like ICAO after U.S. president Richard Nixon normalized relations with Beijing in 1972. The People’s Republic of China has ever since steadfastly refused to recognize Taiwan as anything other than a province of China, with a mission to integrate it eventually under Beijing’s control.
Taiwan is the only country to be refused membership at ICAO. U.S. President Barack Obama recently signed into law a bill advocating “meaningful participation” of Taiwan at the UN body.
Shen, who worked her way up since 1971 from an air traffic controller to become director general of Taiwan’s CAA last July, was invited by ICAO executive council president Roberto Kobeh Gonzalez to this year’s meeting “as a guest.”
Shen said in an interview Wednesday that the invitation came at the request of Taipei, calling the guest status “an innovative idea. It’s a good start.”
“I personally hope it’s a jump (toward full membership at ICAO and other UN bodies).”
The issue has broader implications than the long-standing war of words between the two countries — which occasionally turns more sinister during military exercises.
The paramount mission of ICAO, its two top officials hammered home on Tuesday, is the safety of the world’s air passengers. Secretary General Raymond Benjamin called it “the foremost objective” of the United Nations body.
But Taiwan provides a littleknown gap in the world’s air traffic safety net.
The country’s air system is not less safe, Shen stressed. But the aviation data ICAO shares with its 191 members, critical to safety improvements and innovations, is not shared with Taipei.
Shen said her organization has to resort to bilateral and regional agreements to keep current with the latest aviation norms and practices.
CAA, for instance, forged an agreement with the U.S. air regulator, the Federal Aviation Administration, sharing information and trends, as well as with Australia’s and Europe’s regulators.
In fact, she said, close collaboration with the U.S. began during the Vietnam War, when many U.S. soldiers had layovers in Taiwan on their way to or from the battlefields.
“We try our best ( on safety). Maybe on some things we are a little late, some things we may be missing. But aviation safety is everything, and that’s why we had such a (good reception from ICAO members in Montreal). They say welcome because of the flight safety issue. And congratulations.”
“We can go to (seminars, information sessions and plenary meetings during the Montreal assembly that closes on Oct. 4). but we can’t participate in the discussions,” said C.K. Liu, of Ottawa’s Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Canada.
“We’re not here to complain or to get something from ICAO,” Shen added.
Many Taiwan standards and practices are consistent with ICAO, she noted. But there are slight variations in wordings according to regions. When some pilots, for instance, are told by air traffic controllers at Taipei’s Taoyuan International Airport to “taxi into position and hold, they don’t understand,” Shen said. “They say ‘What does that mean? Hold what?’ ICAO’s phraseology is ‘line up and wait.’ ”
The issue could take a far more ominous turn, though. There have been wide-ranging discussions for years about reducing so-called RVSM,“reducedverticalseparation minimum” of air corridors, that is cutting the distance in altitude between which aircraft are allowed to fly from each other in various directions.
But Shen’s CAA is not privy to the wealth of information discussed at highly technical meetings, which could pose a serious safety problem for the 28 million passengers who fly into Taoyuan airport annually.
Staying current also requires extraordinary initiative — even some cloak and dagger, she added.
ICAO holds technical meetings all over the world about which “we have no information.” But Taiwan, which is not invited, must overcome the problem by showing up anyway.
“We try to attend. Our people will fly to Singapore or wherever, they stay at the hotel (where many ICAO delegates stay), they sleep during the day, and they wait until the meetings are finished. Then the people at the meetings come back to the hotel and talk to our CAA people.” Many do so out of concern for the safety of the global air safety system as well as their own.
“Of course, we supply the drinks,” Shen quipped.
Asked if the multitude of bilateral and regional agreements with Taiwan are cumbersome to administer, Shen replied with a laugh that “it’s a nightmare for the director general (herself).”
Strangely, Beijing “many years ago” proposed to share all the ICAO data with Taiwan — Chinese Taipei, as it is known in diplomacy.
In fact, Beijing insisted, telling CAA officials “we have the (ICAO) books, just give me your email address and we’ll send it — I don’t know if it was for free.”
But accepting the offer would have been an implicit recognition and acceptance of Beijing’s oneChina policy.
“So we didn’t accept it — we couldn’t.”
ICAO spokesman Anthony Philbin would only said that “ICAO follows the one China policy.”