NAAPE's Macabre Dance

Finally NAAPE came out of the trenches after shadow boxing all these while through the legislative arm of government, the response has been quick from the graduate engineers, through their professional body while stains and stones have filtered to other unions and professionals that have made comments in support or against any of the warring group. I sincerely hope this age long rift will simmer and all parties will see reasons why they must work together and kick start a seamless safety relationship. We must be careful of what we say, publish and do with respect to safety, or the option will be to kiss CAT 1 status goodbye and start a rigorous process of recertifying. Ghana lost the FAA Category 1 in 2005 and Indonesia sometime in 2007 lost the CAT 1 status and are still struggling to retain it, despite improved efforts and investment. Back in January 2008, the United States Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), after undertaking an International Aviation Safety Assessment on the Philippines, downgraded the country’s rating to Category 2 from Category 1. The US Embassy subsequently issued a warning to US citizens in the Philippines “to refrain from using Philippine-based carriers due to ‘serious concerns’ about the alleged mishandling of the aviation industry,” in effect blacklisting Philippine air carrier the European Union, following the FAA’s lead, also blacklisted the Philippines and banned Philippine carriers from flying to Europe. Other countries such as Korea and Japan have also used the ICAO, FAA and EU findings as basis for not allowing Philippine carriers to expand services into their respective territories, beyond existing traffic rights previously granted. Till date the Philippines is still a CAT 2 country Also in 2008 the US reflected concerns about Israel's oversight of private aviation, rather than about its commercial carriers or security matters, despite his closeness to the US, Israel lost its CAT 1 status. They were frozen out for four years and only returned to the elite club two months ago. Australia almost lost the CAT 1 status too, due to what was described as parliamentary under privileges with the senate by the state owned investigating agency. It had to lobby using all contacts to avert it. Our greatest challenge is non-adherence to airline reciprocity by our carriers and their inability to attract commercial partnership which has hindered the provision of millions of potential new jobs to aviation and other sectors, while at the same time not attracting foreign direct investment, rather frequency and gauge are being increased by foreign carriers. We cannot afford to include safety and it is erroneous and presumptuous to use the DANA accident as a barometer to rundown our safety achievements when investigations is on going.