Sunday Times 2
U.N. aviation body to hold safety meeting with IATA, others : Sources
View(s):MONTREAL (Reuters) – The U.N. civil aviation agency will hold a broad international meeting to discuss airline safety in the industry’s most coordinated response to the downing of a Malaysian airliner, two sources familiar with the matter said.
The meeting of ICAO and top officials from the airline industry and air traffic controllers, to be held in Montréal next week, comes amid growing calls for action to prevent a repeat of last week’s incident, which killed 298 people.
But both sources also said it was not immediately clear what action would result from the meeting, given the agency’s limited operational role. ICAO does not issue warnings about the dangers linked to conflict.
The United States, home to the world’s biggest domestic aviation market, quickly dampened expectation of any major changes to the way global aviation is organized.
A picture shows a piece of debris of the fuselage at the crash site of the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 near the village of Hrabove (Grabovo) in Ukraine (AFP)
The Montréal meeting will group top officials from the International Civil Aviation Organization as well as the International Air Transport Association and other agencies, the two sources said.
Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 was shot down last week over a part of eastern Ukraine controlled by Russian-speaking separatists. Industry figures have since urged ICAO to take on a bigger role and issue risk advisories.
ICAO, IATA, the Civil Air Navigation Services Organization and Airports Council International will discuss the respective roles of each in airspace over conflict zones, the sources said.
“The idea is for the partners to discuss solutions,” said one aviation industry source close to ICAO, who spoke on condition of anonymity. A spokesman for ICAO said a meeting was under discussion, but had not been confirmed. IATA in Geneva declined to comment.
Two ICAO representatives said the MH17 incident had sparked internal debate on whether the agency could one day provide risk advisories, although they did not expect to see any imminent changes. Member states have ultimate control over their own airspace and may be reluctant to hand over power to ICAO.
ICAO Council President Olumuyiwa Benard Aliu issued a letter on Thursday reminding member states that they were ultimately responsible for ensuring aviation safety in their airspace.
“The obligations of states should not be confused with safety information circulated from time to time by ICAO,” he said in a statement.
In an indication of possible resistance to the idea of giving ICAO more authority, the United States made clear it was currently “not seeking changes” to ICAO’s guidelines after the MH17 disaster and the disappearance of another Malaysia Airlines plane, which had 239 passengers and crew on board, in early March.
The March incident prompted calls for improvements in the way planes are tracked.
“We plan to participate in any ICAO-led reviews related to these events to determine whether changes are called for,” a senior State Department official told Reuters.
Challenges remain
Other hurdles include concerns over potential liability – whether ICAO could be held responsible for an incident in a sector of airspace it had not issued a warning about.
Expanding ICAO’s role would require the agency to obtain sensitive information from its member states about their internal military and political affairs.
“ICAO doesn’t have a view on political disputes,” said a national representative to the agency, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to talk to the media.
“That said, it’s not impossible to do and it is certainly worth looking at.”
Tim Clark, president of Dubai’s Emirates [EMIRA.UL], told Reuters on Sunday he wanted an international conference of carriers to address the disaster, a call backed by Lufthansa.
Clark told CNN on Wednesday the airline industry needed to examine the growing risks from regional conflict and questioned whether all airlines, particularly those from smaller countries, were receiving the same degree of intelligence-sharing about possible threats.
He said the aim of such a conference would be to look at standards and security protocols.
“I’m hoping in the next few weeks … that we can get around the table and at least start having some brainstorming sessions to see what can be improved,” he said.
| How odd is a cluster of plane accidents?
By Alison Gee In the space of eight days, three passenger planes have been lost in mid-flight. A cluster of accidents so close together may seem an unlikely coincidence but is it? The first accident happened on Thursday 17 July, when Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 fell from the sky over eastern Ukraine, apparently brought down by a missile. Seven days later a plane crashed in Taiwan (above), and on the eighth day another flight went down en route to Algeria from Burkina Faso. In all, 462 people are thought to have died. Some people may suddenly be wondering how safe it is to fly. But Harro Ranter, director of the Aviation Safety Network which catalogues plane crashes, says clusters of accidents are not unusual. Analysing the number and frequency of fatal crashes of aircraft capable of carrying 14 or more passengers since 1990, he finds 45 dates when there have been two or more crashes (excluding collisions). In 105 cases there have been accidents on consecutive days. In fact, Ranter says it is more common for an accident to happen just one day after another crash than two, three or more days later. Why might this be? “It is essentially a coincidence, except for the technicality that adverse weather involving thunderstorms and typhoons is more common in some seasons than others,” says Arnold Barnett, a Professor of Statistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. However, Barnett also draws attention to the theory of Poisson distribution, which implies that short intervals between crashes are actually more probable than long ones. “Suppose that there is an average of one fatal accident per year, meaning that the chance of a crash on any given day is one in 365,” says Barnett. “If there is a crash on 1 August, the chance that the next crash occurs one day later on 2 August is 1/365. But the chance the next crash is on 3 August is (364/365) x (1/365), because the next crash occurs on 3 August only if there is no crash on 2 August.” “It seems counterintuitive, but the conclusion follows relentlessly from the laws of probability,” Barnett says. About 500 passengers die in crashes involving scheduled commercial flights each year, and although that number has already been exceeded in 2014 – by about 200 – we should not expect the coming months to have an unusually high number of accidents. Barnett points out that during April, May and June this year, there were no fatal accidents at all involving scheduled commercial flights. “It is hard to imagine that the skill that led to this marvellous record somehow disappeared in July,” he says. He calculates that in developed countries the chance of dying is about one in 25 million per flight. “A child at a UK airport is more likely to grow up to be prime minister than perish on the forthcoming flight… the child is more likely to win an Olympic gold medal or receive the Nobel prize in physics.” Even in the world’s least developed countries the chance of dying on a flight is about one in 750,000. As for the occurrence of three fatal crashes in eight days, David Spiegelhalter, Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk at Cambridge University, has worked out that there is about a six in 10 chance that we should see such a large cluster during a 10-year period, and “the most likely maximum number of crashes of commercial planes with over 18 passengers in any eight-day window over 10 years is exactly three”. (Courtesy BBC) |