Safety assessments not effective for flights over conflict areas, says BALPA

The British Airline Pilots Association (BALPA) has warned that the airline safety assessments for flights over conflict areas are not sufficient.

The pilots group has called on the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) for global leadership in flight operations that are in or over hostile areas.

The move comes in response to last week’s Malaysia Airlines plane crash over Ukraine that killed 298 passengers on-board.

BALPA general secretary Jim McAuslan said: "Individual pilots looking at their flight plans need to have absolute confidence that the right calls are being made.

"The process behind the choice of airspace routing is based on a risk assessment; both by a country’s national aviation security services in the advice that they give to their airlines, and by the airline in how they assess this advice.

"This risk assessment approach can give an illusion of safety but it is in fact vulnerable to all sorts of influences, including commercial pressure, and so it is not surprising to us that there are differences in the way that this risk is assessed by different airlines.

"Passengers and pilots want a uniform level of safety, not one that is decided in secret."

BALPA said that the ICAO is responsible for co-ordinating the safety and order of global aviation, and should have a greater leadership role and strengthened powers to go with that responsibility.

"ICAO’s purpose should be to lead where national authorities cannot and it should have the tools to do that," McAuslan added.

"The problem of the absence of a clear international co-ordination to avoid operations above eastern Ukraine has now become tragically obvious and to avoid a repeat ICAO should be better resourced and enabled to declare airspace unsafe."

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Image: BALPA sees urgent need of global leadership to tackle security threat to civil aviation. Photo: courtesy of British Airline Pilots Association.