De Junaic: Political Control Hinders
Even with the improvement in safety, over 25 per cent of airlines in Africa are yet to meet with ICAO standard and recommended practices? What are you doing about that?
It is not only airlines that have not met the ICAO safety standards. It is actually the regulators and authorities and both ICAO and IATA are working in partnership in organizing workshops, trainings, issuing documents and initiatives to help the authorities, airport operators and the airlines to lift up the safety standards. We have the ones that relate only to airlines, which is IATA Operational Safety Audit (IOSA) and ISAGO (IATA Safety Audit for Ground Operation), by implementing the standards of IOSA and ISAGO, it automatically you would uplifted in your compliance of ICAO recommended standards. So they go hand in hand, and ICAO has accepted IOSA as means to uplift countries standards to what it should be.
At what stage are you bringing Africa in on the turbulence awareness system?
It is a product we are developing and when the product is available, that is after the trials and after the systems acceptance; the airlines will subscribe for it.
We learnt that the fee for the turbulence tool will be $10,000, is it going to be one off or annual fee?
I am not sure that the pricing model has actually been established, and again it is still in development.
For many Africa youths who aspire to work in the industry, many of them want to first do some IATA training but for those developing countries it looks as if it is still a very big challenge to them financially? Is IATA thinking of making them more affordable?
There are two things you said, one, for people who are trying to enter the industry who are not yet employed by an airline or airport. This is one aspect that we have looked at when we redesigned our training strategy. And we have an ongoing programme to really look into the entire way of how IATA offers training worldwide and then regionalise it and the priorities in each region. The cost could be managed by introducing technology, so it could be online training rather than instructive training. The traditional instructive training is normally expensive; it is not because IATA makes it expensive, it is because of the cost of the instructors and the logistics. So digitizing the training channels will help in reducing the cost and make the training material much more affordable and available for youths around the world not only in Africa.
I want to know the level of collaboration you have with regulatory bodies like the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and others in ensuring air safety?
Usually we have quite a good level of corporation with the FAA but we are not doing the job at that place. For instance, in the Boeing 737 Max, we are not in the certification process. We just express our need to have harmonised, aligned, collaborative certification process.
If you look at what FAA did on the issue concerning the Boeing Max, are you optimistic that when the aircraft is recertified people won’t be apprehensive to fly and buy the equipment?
People will probably be apprehensive that is for sure and that is the reason why we are urgently pushing the regulators to have this transparent, aligned and collaborative process of recertification to restore confidence into the system. This is because the confidence has been damaged and it needs to be restored and properly too. Otherwise it will blow not only on Boeing or FAA, it will blow on all the aviation system.
Middle east carriers have adopted a number of procedures to adjust to situations and slow down with growth to confront the current flight challenges. Are those procedures efficient to help Middle East carriers to overcome those problems?
For me it is difficult to comment on individual airlines or group of airlines. The measures that are being taken by the Middle East carriers are classical measures of usually capacity control or programme reshuffling. The only difference is that for the Gulf carriers it is something pretty new, compared to the other carriers that have not had to do it for decades. So it depends on each carrier, so it is difficult to give you a precise and uniform response.
What is your evaluation of the airlines in the Middle East in the last three to six months?
We have published regional figures; Middle East in terms of profitability is suffering more than US, of course, and Europe and even Asia and Africa. So their situation is probably worse.
One of the problems that you mentioned was about constricted airspace in the Middle East, what kind of dialogue is IATA having in trying to encourage the opening of the airspace?
Usually we ask the civil aviation to do two things: to invest in better technology and also to corporate more. In the Gulf before what happened with the blockade, there was already a problem of closed corporation to optimise the design of the sky. After the blockade it has become even worse, so we are pushing governments to cooperate when the political situation allows it. We do work jointly with all the civil aviation authorities and we also leverage our relationship with the Arabs civil aviation organisation. That is the association for all the civil aviation of the Arab countries, to leverage their ability to bring all to the same table and do the two things mentioned here which is investment and technology and investment in integrated redesigning the airspace of this very congested area. And it is an ongoing process.