If the recent spate of air crashes – Athens, Venezuela, Indonesia, Tunisia – were not enough to make us jumpy at the thought of boarding a plane, one only has to remember the brutal imprint left on out collective consciousness by the December 2003 Benin air crash in which at least 140 people – 80 of them Lebanese – lost their lives when a Beirut-bound, chartered Boeing 727 hit a building on takeoff and fell into the sea. The plane was reportedly overloaded and the pilot forced to take at the insistence of an overzealous Lebanese passenger (who, unfairly it might be added, survived the crash). Air safety, stories of badly run airlines and even more badly maintained planes have never been more in the news. However, while one aviation expert claims that safety regulations at Beirut airport are still shockingly lax, the director general of the civil aviation authority declares Lebanon to have clamped down on rogue operators.
There has never been a crash at Beirut International Airport (which receives 80 and 130 planes land a day and serves around 3.5 million passengers annually) although the country is no stranger to aviation mishaps. On 30 September 1975, a Malev (Hungarian Airlines) passenger plane en route from Budapest to Beirut ploughed into the sea six miles off Beirut, killing all 50 passengers and 10 crewmembers (the cause of the crash was never officially determined and remains shrouded in mystery. Speculators suggest the plane was shot down, by either an Israeli or Syrian fighter jet because it was believed to be carrying arms for Palestinians fighters.), while on 13 May, 1977, a Polish carrier, en route from Warsaw came down in Aramoun, 8 km southeast of Beirut, killing all nine people on board.
None of the planes involved were Lebanese. Reassuring? Maybe, but in an exclusive interview with EXECUTIVE, a certified aviation inspector who has worked extensively with Lebanese carriers, has, on condition of anonymity, revealed that there exist serious question marks about the safety of many of Lebanon’s private and charter aircraft because the country lacks the qualified manpower to carry out sufficient, effective inspections. Elsewhere, some inspectors have allegedly been intimidated, pressured or bribed into providing positive inspection results and granting new or reinstating suspended Air Operating Certificates (OACs).
“Safety is not measured by the number of accidents you have,” he said, “but by how often you come close to an accident. Just because we haven’t had any accidents doesn’t mean we are safe. We’ve been lucky so far. The problem lies with those aircraft registered here in Lebanon. Our controls are not done properly. I have worked with a couple of Lebanese airlines. It was a mess. They get their certificates and then nothing is done. No one is doing the oversights, no one is doing the audits. Firstly, there isn’t the manpower and secondly they don’t know how to do it.”
The inspector’s concerns were echoed, albeit in a more general fashion, by a former Lebanese pilot, who when asked if he thought Lebanon’s small private charter airlines were safe, said: “As a retired pilot, I have two fears: dying in a car crash and dying in a charter plane. I fly MEA. I trust them.” He has a point. Air crash statistics bear out the suggestion that flying with an obscure charter company is likely to be far more dangerous than hopping on a “recognized” carrier.
One of the problems with Lebanon’s aviation sector, critics say, is that the Directorate-General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) is still run by the Government, which has blocked any additional inspector recruitment, citing lack of funds. The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) – whose inspectors are now working at Beirut Airport – suggested after an audit a couple of years ago that the country’s civil aviation authority be fully independent.
“In Lebanon politicians interfere in the issue,” the expert charged. “I know of a case in which a minister was using a private Lebanese airplane which didn’t have a valid license after the DGCA issued a report. It then received a phone call from the minister saying: if you touch this plane, you touch me.
“The company I worked with was the same. We’d do an inspection. There’d be a problem. The certificate would be taken away. Then a couple of months later there would be a call from a minister and the certificate would be reinstated. I think issues like this are why the ICAO recommended that the DGCA be fully independent.”
Low salaries offer little incentive to work professionally and, in some instances, make offers of bribes hard to turn down, he said. “When you see them making $700 or $800 a month, with all that work, then you can expect some of them to get bribed,” he said. He said he had heard of inspectors being bribed and on one occasion, when he grounded an aircraft, had been offered a bribe himself. “It was about $15,000,” he said, “to cover up the report.” Another inspector had confided in him that he had been intimidated after he had grounded an aircraft. “They put quite a bit of pressure on him,” he said. “That’s how it works here – political pressure, intimidation and bribery.”
The same problem, the inspector said, bedevils the AOC acquirement process. “It’s the same issue. People with backup can get their certificate with minimum requirements. People working by the book find it difficult to get their certificate because they have to meet all the requirements.”
Lebanon’s Civil Aviation Authority Director-General for the past three years, Dr. Hamdi Chaouk, strongly denied the suggestion that the DGCA was being pressured to cover up inspections or reinstate certificates.
“No way on earth,” he stated, although he acknowledged that early in his tenure at least one attempt had been made to influence a DGCA decision.
“In the beginning, about two years ago, they tried it once, at least to ring me, to ask if our rules were flexible. I said: ‘ No way.’ And this has never happened since then. No one has even dared to approach the matter from the safety side at all. Otherwise I would not be in my job. You would not see me here. You would not see me here one day if I had to change anything as far as licenses or inspections of aircraft – anything to do with safety.”
He conceded that in other domains political pressure might play a role. “For the reallocation of people I can be flexible and political pressure may have a certain influence because I have to live with the real world,” he said.
“But when it comes to safety and security,” he reiterated, “there are no compromises whatsoever. I challenge anyone to suggest that I have ever compromised on this issue.”
Asked if it was possible that inspectors were being pressured or bribed without his knowledge, he responded: “Truthfully, when I first came to this job, I heard that some of the inspectors were influenced by the operators themselves. They were put under pressure financially or were offered assistance, like tickets for their families. They could overlook certain things.”
It was precisely this revelation, in 2003, Chaouk explained, which prompted him to totally overhaul the flight safety department and bring in ICAO staff. “They are well-paid. They cannot be influenced politically. They cannot be influenced socially.” Chaouk said that ICAO staff is now present for every aircraft inspection conducted at Beirut Airport. As a consequence, he added, the possibility of a cover-up was “almost zero.”
For its part, the ICAO’s headquarters in Canada did not immediately respond to Executive’s request for a comment on the matter, while an ICAO staff member working in Lebanon said he could only speak to EXECUTIVE with the permission of Dr. Chaouk, who declined to grant it.
Dr. Chaouk said that the assistance of ICAO staff working at Beirut Airport, two $1.2 million ICAO programs funded by the Lebanese government, and a two-year-old law giving him greater powers to suspend AOCs had made Beirut Airport tougher on air safety than any other airport in the region.
He admitted that his efforts to tighten the screws had created political friction. “Have they caused political problems? Yes. I have stopped the aircrafts of many influential people. Sometimes it does cause problems,” he said.
And yes the DGCA is not yet fully independent, although giant strides in that direction have been made, he conceded. The law, he explained, has been approved by parliament. However, one final approval is needed by the Council of Ministers. “But because of what has been happening in the country, they are waiting for the right moment.”
Dr. Chaouk also acknowledged that he was in need of additional qualified manpower. “If we don’t do that, we’re going to come up short in that domain and we won’t be able to implement everything.” But the manpower shortage will not ease until the DGCA is fully autonomous and the embargo on new talent is lifted. “Under the current law we are not allowed to recruit, among other reasons for financial reasons. It’s a problem. The new law will solve it. We’ll be able to advertise.”
Chaouk conceded the ICAO presence had compensated for the Lebanese manpower shortfall so that aircraft safety and the inspection process were no longer being jeopardized. Meanwhile, Chaouk stressed, no one should doubt his department’s commitment to air safety.
“We prevent unsatisfactory aircraft from even flying over Lebanon,” he noted. “We are known to be the toughest in the Middle East. We even have a list of aircraft [Tupolev and Antonov] that we don’t allow to land here anymore. We inspected so many of them in the past and they all failed. Many European countries still let these aircraft land.”
As part of the Lebanese civil aviation restructuring program, Chaouk will soon publish a blacklist (see box) of countries and airlines that are banned from flying to Lebanon and claims that with the help of the ICAO staff currently in Lebanon, the DGCA has checked “almost every” aircraft using Beirut Airport.
“We may be seen as extreme. But this is the only way to clean up the whole market,” the he declared.
In an indication of the stringency of DGCA supervision, he said, over the last two years, the DGCA has granted AOCs to a total of only five out of 25 Lebanese charter applicants – menajet; Flying Carpet; ASAS; Executive Aircraft Services; and BERYTOS airlines. He said another five charter airlines were currently applying for AOCs.
“We inspect the charter aircraft currently operating,” he went on. “We are continually monitoring. Whenever there is any problem, we immediately stop the aircraft or airline from operating,”
And what the DGCA giveth, it also taketh away. Chaouk said that as many as 12 Lebanese AOCs had been suspended over the last two years – again an indication of how serious his department is about ensuring aircraft airworthiness. About half have since been reinstated.
The DCGA has also withdrawn, over the last two years, more than 10 AOCs belonging to foreign companies. None has been reinstated. Some of those banned, such as Egypt’s Lotus Air, have since had accidents.
Chaouk’s efforts appear to be paying off: “Beirut Airport has been audited by the ICAO and by European institutions. I have been told by Great Britain that they have audited a lot of countries in the Middle East and Beirut scores the highest grades in safety and security.” He has also won praise from Lebanese air industry insiders.
The inspector who warned about the safety issues at Beirut Airport and Dr. Chaouk do agree on one thing – Lebanon’s Middle East Airlines (MEA) and newly-established Lebanese charter airline menajet are as safe as any airline in the world, in great part because their aircraft must pass regular French aviation inspections.
In fact, MEA has a French AOC and its only crashes had nothing to do with safety. Back on 1 February 1963 an MEA Vickers Viscount 754D collided in midair over Ankara, Turkey, with a Turkish air force Douglas C-47. All 17 occupants of the planes were killed, as well as 87 people on the ground. Then on 1 January 1976, a bomb exploded on an MEA Boeing 727 over northeast Saudi Arabia, killing all 81 passengers and crew.
(BOX)
Almost two years the Benin crash, the Directorate-General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) is about to publish its aviation blacklists. There are in fact three lists: one of airlines, one of countries, and one of brands. They were drawn up following a DGCA survey, carried out in conjunction with International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) staff working at Beirut Airport, of almost all aircraft using the airport.
The airlines affected have been banned either for technical reasons, or because they have not been audited by the ICAO or are not an ICAO-contracting state.
“I am about to publish the list, like the rest of the world,” Chaouk, said. “I didn’t want to publish it before because I didn’t want to get into diplomatic questions, but safety cannot be compromised.” He said, admitting that he nonetheless expected diplomatic problems between Lebanon and some of the countries blacklisted.
Asked if the Lebanese Government – which has ties to a number of the countries listed, and still holds sway over the DGCA – was likely to bring pressure to bear on him, he said: “Even bilateral agreements state that each country has sovereignty over its security…it’s not because Lebanon has diplomatic relations with certain countries that I have to accept any planes landing here, because, believe me, when something happens here it’s going to affect the economy of the whole country, not to mention create diplomatic, political and financial consequences.”
“We are known as the toughest in the Middle East,” he said. “We are the only country in the Middle East and maybe world-wide to draw up a blacklist by country.”
Of the decision to ban the Russian aircraft brands Antonov and Tupolev, Chaouk said: “We inspected so many of them and more than 90% failed.
The countries whose airlines are banned from Beirut Airport are: Afghanistan; Antigua & Barbados; Benin [site of the December 2003 Beirut-bound chartered Boeing 727 crash]; the Democratic Republic of Congo; Ecuador; Gambia; Guinea; Grenada; Micronesia; Saint Vincent & The Grenadines; Swaziland; Sierra Leone; Somalia; Saint Lucia; Equatorial Guinea; Togo; Aruba; Angola; Liberia; the Virgin Islands; the Cayman Islands; the Solomon Islands.
The airlines on a provisional list are: Africa Lines-Central African Republic; Air Memphis-Egypt; Air Van Airlines-Armenia; Central Air Express-Democratic Republic of Congo; ICTTPW-Libya; International Air Tours Limited-Nigeria; Johnsons Air Limited-Ghana; Silverback Cargo Freighters-Rwanda; South Airlines-Ukraine.
Dr. Chaouk said this list would grow.
