It signs pact with global aviation body to support effective safety oversight.

Jul 02, 2007
Reuters

KUTA, Indonesia, July 2 (Reuters) - Indonesia has signed an agreement with the global aviation body to improve air safety in the wake of a string of accidents and after the European Union banned the country's airlines from its airspace last week.

The International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) co-signed the pact at a conference in Bali on Monday.

Under the agreement, Indonesia pledged to enact laws to support effective safety oversight, to ensure the required level of financial and human resources, and to correct shortcomings identified during internal and external audits.

Jakarta has also committed to implementing safety management based on ICAO standards.

"Indonesia must act quickly and decisively to regain the confidence of the world aviation community and the traveling public," ICAO president Roberto Kobeh Gonzales told the conference on the resort island.

Gonzales said part of the problem stemmed from recent exponential growth of airlines and passengers in Indonesia.

"This has exerted tremendous financial, technical, legal and political pressure on your ability to keep pace with the demands of a rapidly expanding market," he said.

Indonesia has been under pressure to improve transport safety after a series of air and ferry accidents since late last year.

In March, a Garuda Indonesia plane with 140 people on board overshot the runway in Yogyakarta and burst into flames, killing 21 people, five of them Australians.

In January, a plane belonging to budget carrier Adam Air crashed into the sea off Sulawesi. All 102 on board are presumed dead.

Indonesian Transport Minister Jusman Syafii Djamal told reporters after the meeting that improvements in aviation safety had been made but accepted more needed to be done.

But the minister expressed disappointment with the EU ban, saying it violated ICAO'S principles of fairness and reciprocity, and said Indonesia planned to send a delegation to Brussels.

"We don't want the process of improving our aviation safety to be done by isolating our airlines," he said.

No Indonesian carriers fly to the European Union, but the ban will damage the sprawling archipelago's tourist industry, as Europeans will be warned not to use Indonesian airlines on transit routes, such as between Jakarta and the island of Bali.

The director-general of civil aviation at the transport ministry, Budhi Mulyawan Suyitno, told Reuters on Thursday that Indonesia had made many improvements in air safety, but failed to submit data to the European Union in time.

Indonesia announced in June after an audit that only national carrier Garuda Indonesia made the top ranking of three levels.

In April, the United States advised its citizens to avoid flying Indonesian airlines, saying there were serious concerns about their safety standards.

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