Air Safety Can’t Be Compromised

AIR Namibia has been surrounded by controversy for some time now, but much of the attention has been on the airline’s inability to make a financial go of things. The concern we wish to express today has more to do with the safety issue, which must take precedence above all others.

Recently this newspaper revealed that certain individuals at Air Namibia were attempting to ‘bypass’ pilot licensing rules by authorising unqualified pilot/s to fly. Although an Air Namibia spokesperson denied the allegation and insisted the ‘system had waterproof checks and balances with the Directorate of Civil Aviation acting as a watchdog’, there was enough concern about the issue of allowing an (unlicensed) South African woman to fly that a DCA examiner handed in his resignation over the incident.The ‘pilot’ in question had been with South African Airways prior to her appointment at Air Namibia, and there had been deployed into a desk job since she had not passed the conversion training required for flying. When it was discovered that she was not in possession of a valid flying licence, the DCA had withdrawn her validation certificate, requiring her to renew her SA pilot’s licence and re-do a practical flying exam before they would grant her permission to fly here.That Air Namibia reportedly took issue with the DCA stance is reason for concern.Air Namibia cannot afford to compromise its fairly sound air safety record. There have been a number of small plane accidents in Namibia (not Air Namibia planes) over the past year, several of them out of Eros Airport, and these in turn have raised concern about pilot training and maintenance of small aircraft in particular.In some instances, pilot training and maintenance of aircraft have been raised as separate concerns, and part reason for the crashes.Air safety is something which we cannot allow to be compromised and the strictest of regulations must be applied to the airline industry in general, the national airline Air Namibia in particular, to ensure that our skies are safe.We are coming up to a time when the 2010 World Cup in South Africa will probably mean more planes in the air and more flights in and out of our country, and we need to ensure that safety standards are the highest they’ve ever been.Scrupulous procedures of appointing pilots, among others, should be applied as a matter of urgency, and should never be an arbitrary thing. There need to be checks and balances and the DCA’s role in this regard is absolutely crucial to ensure that those who don’t have the qualifications to fly a plane don’t get to be behind the controls.The International Air Transport Association (IATA), the air transport watchdog, confirms that while air is the safest way to travel, an examination of the 2009 accident rate shows that Africa’s rate of 9.94 is significantly higher than the rate of 2008 which stood at 2.2 and that Africa ‘has once again the worst rate of the world’. Overall, and throughout most countries, the accident rate had dropped over this period, but in Africa generally, this was not the case.A lot of travellers to our continent will undoubtedly be deterred from coming to Namibia and other parts of Africa if our bad reputation in regard to air safety persists.It is therefore absolutely imperative that Air Namibia do its part and scrupulously observe IATA’s Safety Programme and other demands of the industry to ensure that air safety is further improved, rather than being compromised by bad decisions on the part of a few individuals.We therefore urge Air Namibia not to look at media exposure in this regard in a negative light, but to ensure that the safety of air passengers in Namibian skies is not placed at unnecessary risk.

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