The British Airline Pilots Association (BALPA) has said airline safety assessments for ‘risky’ flights over areas of conflict are “not good enough”.
BALPA’s general secretary Jim McAuslan has said risk assessments should follow the same set of standards and has called for a “uniform level of safety, not one decided in secret”.
It follows last week’s Malaysia Airlines MH17 crash, which killed 298 people after being shot down over East Ukraine.
“Individual pilots looking at their flight plans need to have absolute confidence that the right calls are being made,” said McAuslan.
“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.”
He added: “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.”
BALPA also called for global leadership from the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICA) in all operations over areas of conflict.
ICAO is the UN body responsible for co-ordinating the safety and order of global aviation across States. And BALPA has said it 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,” said McAuslan.
“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.”
US and European flights to Tel Aviv have been suspended after a Delta flight had to be diverted to Paris after a rocket went off close to Ben Gurion airport.