Published: 3/27/1998

At the round-table on civil aviation held by the Business People magazine, Rudolf Temurazov, deputy chairman of MAK, the Interstate Aviation Committee, stated that since 1996 flight safety in the CIS has been improving. The number of incidents and accidents on CIS-registered civil aircraft decreased from 57 (20 catastrophes) in 1996 down to 42 (14) in the following year, in which 293 and 264 people were killed respectively. The largest recent catastrophes were of a Russian An-24 near Cherkessk, the Tadjik national carrier's Tu-154 in Arab Emirates and a Ukrainian Yak-42 in Greece. A total to 207 out of 208 people aboard died in these three accidents. In Russia in 1997 there were 35 accidents and 80 people killed. Large Russian airliners (whose share in total flight time stood at 75%) had two, one and zero crashes in 1995, 1996 and 1997 respectively (when flying scheduled flights), in which 150, 5 and 0 people were killed. In all, the level of flight safety in the CIS today is the same as it was in the golden years of the Soviet Aeroflot, and is close to that in the US. At the same time, the situation with smaller commercial aircraft has been worsening. In 1996, there were ten crashes in which 241 people died; 207 more people were killed in 1997. Non-regular flights tend to be much more dangerous than scheduled flights. People are killed in between a half and one-third of all accidents involving non-regulars, whereas the figure is only one case out of ten for the 'schedules'. As there were very few non-scheduled flights in the Soviet Union, MAK cannot prepare a reliable comparison with past decades. Temurazov described the situation with flight safety on non-regular lines as "deplorable". Causes are said to be bad planning, pre-flight and flight preparations. Usually deprived of financial resources for operational needs, small and weak operators fail to get licences for schedules and are forced to work on charter flights. They economise on everything, including accident-prevention measures. For instance, the An-24 crash near Cherkessk (50 people killed) was due to the lack of elementary checks performed on the airframe (extensive corrosion resulted in a huge crack in the tail section, leading to airframe disintegration during the flight). As the share of relatively large air companies in total flight time logged by CIS aviation is high, the resulting flight safety figures improve on the background of a decline in the number of small operators. Temurazov stated that the improvement was achieved thanks to the due measures taken at the state level by many CIS aviation authorities, particularly in Russia. According to him, the Federal Aviation Service of the Russian Federation (FAS RF) and its regional branches are exercising "super strict demands" on operators performing charter flights. Every-day control is exercised by 410 inspectors working at the FAS RF central office in Moscow and 1,600 more at 19 regional offices.(VK) (AL398.3)

Article ID: 121