AUTHORITIES OPTIMISTIC THAT EU AIR BAN WILL BE LIFTED

The Mozambican civil aviation authorities say they expect the European Union to remove Mozambican air companies from the list of airlines banned from flying in European airspace, since the safety problems invoked by the EU have now been overcome.The European Commission issued the ban in April, announcing that “all air carriers certified in Mozambique have been banned from flying into the EU ... because of significant safety deficiencies requiring decisive action”.Those deficiencies did not concern Mozambique Airlines (LAM), or any other Mozambican air company, but the regulatory agency, the Mozambican Civil Aviation Institute (IACM).According to the EU report, a delegation from the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) visited Maputo in January to carry out an audit into safety procedures which “reported a large number of significant deficiencies with regard to the capability of the civil aviation authorities of Mozambique to discharge their air safety oversight responsibilities”.The audit found that over 77 per cent of ICAO standards were not effectively implemented. It continued that “on certain critical elements such as the provision for qualified technical personnel, more than 98 per cent of ICAO standards were not effectively implemented”.The EU acknowledged efforts made by IACM to rectify the safety concerns, but considered that, as of April, IACM is “not able to implement and enforce the relevant safety standards on all air carriers under their regulatory control. Therefore, all air carriers certified in Mozambique should be subject to an operating ban”.Speaking to reporters on Thursday, the IACM General Director, Alberto Mabjaia, said that audits undertaken in September showed that the irregularities detected by the ICAO have been overcome, and so the country has been removed from the ICAO black list.“We have resolved the fundamental problems we had during the ICAO audit of 2010”, said Mabjaia. Since Mozambique is no longer on the ICAO black list, “we expect that the EU will now take a decision about the banning of Mozambican air companies”.The ban did not result in the cancellation of any flights, because the only company flying to Europe is LAM, and its Maputo-Lisbon flights were exempt because they are operated by a Portuguese company, EuroAtlantic.Nonetheless, Mabjaia believed the EU ban had a serious impact on the Mozambican economy. The ban “causes constraints, both for the companies affected and for the country. When such bans are imposed, European citizens are advised not to travel in the flights of the countries affected, so ticket sales fall, and the number of foreign tourists visiting the country also falls”.European citizens may mistakenly believe that the ban means that LAM and other Mozambican air companies are unsafe. In fact, LAM’s safety record is enviable. On 26 October, LAM received the prized IOSA (IATA Operational Safety Audit) certificate for the third consecutive time, following an audit held by IATA (International Air Traffic Association) in June.LAM received the IOSA certificate for the first time in 2007, and was then recertified in 2009 and now again in 2011. Three consecutive safety certificates indicate that IATA certainly thinks it is safe for passengers to take LA flights.Since LAM was set up, in 1980 it has not had a single fatal accident. And since 1989 there have been no accidents of any kind involving LAM planes.Some major European airlines can make no such boast. For example, Air France has had nine accidents since 1980, four of them with fatalities, and a total death toll of 351.