— The crash of Bek Air flight 2100 is a tragedy that would have been avoided with better industry oversight. The government should now prioritise this, writes Paolo Sorbello.
JAN. 13 2020 (The Bulletin) — Early on Dec. 27, a Bek Air passenger plane flying from Almaty to Nur-Sultan crashed into a building just seconds after taking off. This tragedy shocked Kazakhstan, 12 of the 102 people on board were killed, but it was an accident waiting to happen.
Owned by Nurbol Sultan, one of Kazakhstan’s richest men, Bek Air is a low-cost airline in Kazakhstan and does not hold a licence to fly abroad. In 2016, Bek Air became the only Kazakh aviation company to refuse to take the IOSA, a safety audit by the International Air Transport Association (IATA). It said the cost of taking the safety test was prohibitive but this line of reasoning was dismissed by other local airlines, who said the cost of the audit was a fraction of the price of a ticket.
Other passenger airlines in Kazakhstan, Air Astana, SCAT, and Qazaq Air, are registered with the IATA. FlyArystan, the low-cost division of Air Astana that was established in 2019, flies on Air Astana’s Airline Operator Certificate (AOC) and is therefore also a full member of the IATA.
The Kazakh aviation market is price sensitive and this is where Bek Air was competitive. Its tickets between Almaty and Nur Sultan had generally been cheaper than Air Astana’s, the flagship Kazakh airline. Fares on FlyArystan, though, were comparable to those of Bek Air.
One European pilot explained why the Bek Air flights were cheap: “The difference in pricing is the missing zeal in maintenance and safety checks.”
After the crash, infrastructure minister Roman Sklyar admitted that “Bek Air and others have the right to fly in Kazakhstan because local standards are not the same as IOSA”. This is a worrying shortfall that needs correcting.
We are still waiting for the full results of the investigation but even so, the government’s response has been timid. Bek Air’s licence was stripped indefinitely. Sklyar could have said the government would work to bring airlines up to standard but he didn’t and this is an opportunity missed.
Passenger airlines in Kazakhstan should be held accountable to international standards whichever the route they fly. Some flight routes across Kazakhstan last three hours, longer than most flights in Europe.
The Kazakh government has to make sure that it shows that it can learn from this crash and improve oversight of its aviation industry. This is the least that can be done in the memory of those killed in Bek Air flight 2100.
–Paolo Sorbello if a journalist and analyst based in Almaty
ENDS
— This story was first published in issue 433 of the weekly Bulletin on Jan. 13 2020
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