Flight Safety Standards to be Increased
Monday, 13 November, 2006 | 17:22 WIB

TEMPO Interactive, Jakarta: The Transportation Department and national airlines have agreed to increase flight safety standards gradually until 2010.

These safety standards have adopted the Safety Management System (SMS) issued by the World Civilian Flight Association.

Yurlis Hasibuan, Head of the Sub-Directorate for Airplane Maintenance at the Transportation Department, said that the SMS is a system that obliges every airline to set up a specific security working unit within the company's organizational structure.

So far security working units are only sub-divisions, so airline managements do not concentrate much on them.

Nonetheless, under SMS, airline security unit will later be responsible directly to company managements.

“To be precise, in an airline structure, there will be a security director who will no longer be below the operations director,” Yurlis told Tempo last weekend.

It is hoped that this SMS can lower the flight accident ratio from 2.46 by this year to 1.25 by 2010.

This would mean that the number of flight accidents, which so far this year have reached nine times a year, could be reduced to three times a year.

“This has to be categorized as an extraordinary incident,” he said.

In total, this years the ratio of plane accidents from high to low level is 6.8.

This means, the number of total accident every year that happened in Indonesia amounted to 21 out of total plane departures of between 323 and 400 times.

This ratio places Indonesia the first place as the country with the highest accident rate in Southeast Asia.

Therefore, the intensity of grand maintenance or c-check will be increased.

“Now every airline must submit maintenance data every year,” said Yurlis.

Airlines must also submit regular checking (daily), light maintenance (a-check) and medium checking (b-check).

Anton Aprianto