Egypt Today Magazine February 2004

Are Charters Safe?

Two deadly crashes in two weeks puts the spotlight on regional charter airline safety

The January 3, 2003, crash of an Egyptian Flash Airlines Boeing 737 that took the lives of 133 French tourists and 13 Egyptian crew members off the coast of the Sharm El-Sheikh resort town was the second deadly crash to hit the Middle East in under two weeks.

Just nine days earlier, a Union des Transports Africains (UTA) Boeing 727 crashed into the ocean off the West African state of Benin, killing 139 people, most of them Lebanese nationals on their way home for the Christmas holidays.

Both Flash Airlines and UTA are charter airline companies, and the tragedies have brought to the fore a debate on whether charter airlines are living up to non-charter — or scheduled airliners — in terms of safety.

International experts say there is much to be weary about when it comes to choosing between a scheduled carrier and charters, but a senior official at Egypt’s Ministry of Civil Aviation counters that the situation here at home is much less dangerous than the hype would have you believe.

Charter airlines differ from scheduled airlines in that they don’t always operate on a regular or fixed schedule. Air tickets are offered at a cheaper price because they are often rolled into an all-inclusive vacation package, and because the charters tend to pack more people on their flights while skimping on services. Although most charter airlines lease their crafts, many also own their airplanes.

According to the Aviation Safety Network (ASN), an independent group based in The Netherlands that tracks plane crashes, 2002 and 2003 were two of the least deadly years in modern aviation history. ASN’s statistics show a record low of 25 fatal airliner incidents in 2003, killing a total of 677 passengers and crew members.

But the charter airline industry doesn’t appear to be following the international aviation industry’s trend of improving safety, says Jim Eckes, managing director of the Hong Kong consulting firm Indoswiss Aviation Ltd.

“Excluding North America and Europe, there is a [higher] accident rate among charter airlines [versus scheduled airlines] worldwide,” Eckes says.

Concrete numbers to back that assertion are hard to come by even among industry insiders, but a 2002 study by Boeing, the world’s largest manufacturer of commercial and military aircraft, addresses the safety of scheduled passenger operations versus “all other operations.” (The “all other” category includes unscheduled passenger and charter airlines, cargo, ferry — the delivery of an aircraft by flying it to its operator — test, training and demonstration.)

The study covers the period from 1993 to 2002, where the accident rate for scheduled airlines was 1.12 per million departures. In the “all other” category, which includes charter airlines, the rate was more than double at 2.41 accidents per million departures.

Eckes says the safety record of charter airlines in particular “sticks out like a sore thumb because of the high number of charter companies set up in countries that have very little regulation.”

This is particularly true of Africa (which includes Egypt for aviation purposes), Eckes says. ASN figures back up his claims, revealing that African flights accounted for 28 percent of all fatal airline accidents in 2003 despite making up only three percent of world aircraft departures.

All airlines are required to follow the same international safety standards, says David Learmount, operations and safety editor of Flight International magazine, a United Kingdom publication. But Learmount says this is the rule, not necessarily the norm.

“A total of [188] nations have signed the Chicago Convention, and it is expected that signatories of the treaty would carry it out.Unfortunately, this is not always the case.”

The Chicago Convention — formally called the Convention on International Civil Aviation — came into effect in 1947 and serves as the charter of the International Civil Aviation Authority (ICAO), the United Nations agency whose mandate is to ensure the safety of civilian flights worldwide.

While the ICAO sets safety standards, it is essentially each country’s own aviation authority that enforces them. The ICAO has teams that perform safety inspections, but it can’t monitor airlines around the world on a day-to-day basis, meaning each country must ensure ICAO standards are being met.

Although charter airlines are subject to the same safety standards as scheduled airlines, Eckes says that some countries focus more attention on scheduled carriers, allowing charters to fly beneath the radar.

“Certain countries, such as Canada, the US and most European nations, regulate their airlines — whether charter or non-charter — with the same high safety standards,” Eckes says. “But in other countries, there are enormous gaps in terms of safety standards [between charter and scheduled airlines.]”

Charter safety problems often stem from the issuing of operating licenses, Eckes explains, which in some countries are far too easy to come by. Once up and running, Eckes says a charter airline in a country with lax standards can simply get away with below par safety practices.

“The [charter companies] will buy an airplane or lease an airplane that is in great condition, but then it might start skimping on maintenance, or their pilots might not be subject to simulator training on a regular basis. Some also tend to have their crews fly more hours each month [than scheduled airlines],” Eckes says.

Learmount explains that an airline’s planes can be serviced anywhere in the world, but safety standards must meet those set by ICAO. “Regardless of who performs the maintenance, however, the airline remains legally responsible for the safety of the airplanes.”

Flash Airlines was banned from flying into Switzerland by Swiss authorities in 2002 because of safety fears. After the January 3 crash, the Swiss Federal Office for Civil Aviation announced that a series of ICAO safety regulation violations were found in one of the two Flash Boeing 737s during a routine security check at Zurich Airport in October 2002.

Egyptian Civil Aviation Minister Ahmed Shafiq called the charge "baseless."

“The Swiss authorities informed us of a ground inspection of the Flash Airlines aircraft on October 11, 2002 but the report given to us did not include any information that the airline was banned from their airspace,” Shafiq told the local press.

Flash Airlines Chairman Mohamed Nour also denied the ban was safety related, but the Swiss quickly countered Nour’s claim, saying the ban was indeed the result of their inspectors’ concerns about airworthiness.

Also in October of 2002, an engine on one of the Flash planes caught fire over Greece during a flight to Bologna, Italy, from Sharm El-Sheikh. The plane made an emergency landing at Athens airport, with fire engines waiting alongside the runway.

For Learmount, a good indication of whether an airline should be trusted is not necessarily whether it is a charter or scheduled airline, but whether it comes from a country in which the culture values human life.

“When you talk to airlines about how to be safe, they always end up talking about safety culture. Yes, an airline might abide by minimum safety standards, but is the airline in a country that values human life as highly as other cultures value human life?” Learmount asks.

In Europe, where Learmount says the culture of safety is strong, about 50 percent of travelers journey by charter, and there is no statistical difference in the safety numbers of charter and scheduled airlines on the continent.

He says that for the rest of the world, charter travel only makes up about five percent of the industry, and safety varies from country to country.

“When people ask me about the safety of a particular airline,” Learmount says, “I counter with questions about the safety practices of the country in which the airline is based. I ask them how well they know the country. What is the road safety like? How safe are the bus drivers? All of these will give an indication of what the safety culture is like.”

Seven companies operate passenger charter airline services in Egypt, says Samir Abdel Maboud, undersecretary of state for air transport at Egypt’s Ministry of Civil Aviation, but over 20 charter licenses have been issued, most being used to operate taxi (carrying less than 50 passengers per plane) and cargo services.

Abdel Maboud says the Flash Airline crash was Egypt’s first passenger charter plane to go down since the ministry began issuing charter licenses more than 15 years ago. Safety standards at the charter airlines in Egypt are just as closely monitored as scheduled airlines, he adds.

“They have to pass the same series of steps [than the scheduled airlines] before a license is issued, and are subject to the same safety standards all around,” Abdel Maboud explains.

The Ministry of Civil Aviation strictly adheres to the ICAO safety standards when deciding on whether to issue a charter license and in ensuring that all airlines in Egypt are maintaining the same high safety standards. Abdel Maboud says that after a request for a charter license is made, it typically takes just under a year for a company to pass through all of the steps, and if successful, receive an operating license.

Abdel Maboud says that Egypt’s charter airlines fly all over the world, but their main routes are between here and Europe in addition to a number of African countries.

Despite the number of charters operating here, the companies are often not well-known outside of travel agent circles. Charter airline AMC, for example, claims to be Egypt’s second biggest airline after EgyptAir.

At press time, unconfirmed reports suggested the Flash Airlines flight went down as a result of pilot error, a development that, coupled with the UTA crash and Africa’s already dismal aviation record, does not bode well for consumer acceptance of charter flights.

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