Air safety: Flying into the unknown

By Barbara S. Peterson

updated 2:03 p.m. ET Dec. 5, 2007

Air travel in North America and Western Europe has never been safer, but a recent spate of accidents has aviation experts sounding a warning in many other regions. Barbara S. Peterson investigates the risks of flying unfamiliar airlines in increasingly popular destinations.

On a rain-soaked day last July, a TAM Airlines A320 landing at São Paulo's Congonhas Airport ran off the runway and crashed into a cargo building after skidding across a busy traffic artery; 199 people were killed in the accident, making it the worst aviation disaster in Brazil's history. A month later, I am standing near the crash site, where all that remains is a pile of rubble in an abandoned lot across from the airport. What's most striking about the scene is that Congonhas, Brazil's busiest domestic airport, is smack in the middle of a thriving business and residential quarter in the largest metropolis in South America. It's as if LaGuardia Airport were a few steps from Canal Street.

After the crash, it was widely reported that the São Paulo attorney general's office had tried to close the airport to large jets over concerns that its inefficient runway drainage system put both passengers and residents at risk. An appeals judge overturned the order. I'm in Brazil to see firsthand what has been labeled the country's "aviation crisis" by media commentators and consumer watchdogs in South America and elsewhere. TAM and Gol, two airlines that have seen recent dramatic growth, have each suffered a fatal crash in the past year. In September 2006, a Gol 737 collided with an Embraer Legacy corporate jet in midair over the Amazonian rain forest in clear skies with no other air traffic; all 154 passengers aboard the Gol flight perished, while the 7 aboard the corporate jet survived. Brazil has criminally charged the two American pilots of the Embraer Legacy, alleging reckless flying, and at press time was trying them in absentia; several air-traffic controllers who were on duty at the time of the crash face similar charges.

The state of air travel in Brazil is so problematic—recent air-traffic-control breakdowns, controller work slowdowns, and the removal of top aviation officials have only compounded the troubles—that the International Air Transport Association (IATA), which represents the majority of the world's carriers, said in August that Brazil has "serious safety deficiencies." Antonio R. Lorenzo, a spokesman for the Brazilian Air Force, which oversees aviation safety, says that accidents have decreased dramatically over the past 17 years, even as the number of aircraft has increased. Nonetheless, in 2006, the accident rate for Brazilian airlines was 3.5 times higher than the rate for Latin American carriers overall. Yet when I meet an American businessman who flies often out of Congonhas to Rio and Brasília, he is unfazed by the controversy. "What am I going to do, drive?" he jokes.

His is an attitude shared by many Americans who often have no choice but to fly unfamiliar airlines in countries whose aviation safety records are largely unknown to the general public. While flight safety in North America and Western Europe has never been better and continues to improve, the same is not true in some other regions. Statistics compiled by the U.K. aviation consultancy Ascend, in an exclusive report for Condé Nast Traveler, show that Africa, with just 4 percent of air traffic worldwide, had 30 percent of the fatal crashes over the past five years. During the same period, Russia and the other countries that once made up the Soviet Union recorded one fatality for every 424,000 passengers; in North America, the rate was one fatality for every 38 million passengers. The September crash of an aircraft belonging to a Thai budget airline, as well as a series of fatal accidents in Indonesia, have raised fears that some Asian countries may not be adequately monitoring their rash of upstart carriers. (See "Upstart Airlines")

This safety gap is leading to an unprecedented push to force countries to open up sensitive safety files for inspection. In fact, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), a United Nations affiliate based in Montreal, has given its 190 member nations until next spring to post safety audit results on its public Web site. The ultimate impact of this order remains uncertain, since ICAO lacks enforcement powers, but officials say that countries who refuse to participate will be conspicuous by their absence. "Their silence will speak volumes—it will send a clear message that they have something to hide," says an official who asked not to be named. As of September, some 80 countries had agreed to release at least some safety information. "Sovereign countries have a right to look under the covers anyplace they have airline service," says William Voss, chief of the Flight Safety Foundation in Washington, D.C. "The best thing the international community can do is apply economic pressure on the countries and carriers that need to improve."

The birth of the blacklist
The turning point in the fight for increased transparency came in 2004 with the crash of a Paris-bound Flash Airlines flight from the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh. All 148 passengers and crew were killed. In 2002, the Swiss government had banned the Egyptian charter carrier from its airspace because of a variety of safety infractions, but its list of 23 banned carriers was classified and was therefore unknown to the mostly French travelers on board. The subsequent outrage over the secrecy led to a call for a European-wide ban on unsafe airlines, a list that would be available to the public. Several accidents in 2005, one of the worst years in the past decade for air safety, only ratcheted up the pressure.

In March 2006, just as the European community was finalizing its blacklist, ICAO adopted a policy requiring member nations to open their safety files. The move was opposed by a coalition of virtually all South American countries (which backed down at the last minute) and a bloc of African nations. In the words of one Gambian representative, it would "kill our tourism industry and our airlines." The ICAO chief at the time, Assad Kotaite, was unmoved, although he did give countries two years to comply. "The world will not forgive us if we do not act," he said.

While outright bans on carriers are rare, the FAA has, since the early 1990s, periodically dispatched teams of inspectors to nations whose airlines fly (or intend to fly) to the United States. The FAA then places the countries in one of two groups: Category 1, meaning they are in compliance with minimum standards set by ICAO, or Category 2, which means they fall below the mark. Recently, the agency downgraded Indonesia to Category 2 after a series of fatal accidents that culminated in the March crash of a Garuda Airlines plane in which 22 died; the European, however, Union took a stronger stance and banned all of Indonesia's carriers from flying to an EU country. The Indonesian government has protested that it wasn't given a fair hearing.

The United States rarely bans airlines, but it doesn't allow those from Category 2 countries to increase the number of flights they make into the U.S. or to launch service. (No Indonesian carriers currently fly into the country.) The FAA says its approach is as effective as the EU ban, explaining that it gives countries a strong economic incentive to shape up. The FAA currently lists 20 Category 2 nations, including Belize, Gambia, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Paraguay; two years ago, there were 34 countries on the watch list. The fact that 14 countries (including Argentina, Greece, and Guatemala) were subsequently upgraded suggests that there's a motivational aspect to the policy.

In interviews with a dozen safety officials and members of pilot and air-traffic controller organizations, we identified the most pressing safety issues today and some remedies currently being considered:

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