Between last three months there have been three aircraft incident on the Nepalese aviation territory which indicates the need of collaboration between government and airlines to maintain air safety. Last February, 50 people lost their lives on the US Bangla aircraft accident on the TIA runway. Similarly, Malindo Air’s Boeing 737-900ER aircraft veered off the runway on 20th April due to which airport halted for 24 hrs. Recently, another aircraft Makalu Air Cessna Grand Caravan 208B met a crash on Simikot where captain and co-pilot passed away.
Makalu Air Cessna Grand Caravan 208B crash at Simikot on May 16 2018
Time and again Nepal has been blacklisted by the European commission citing non-compliance of ICAO protocols in eight critical elements. Later on Nepal became successful to be out from the ICAO Safety Concern list but these increasing incidents have made Nepal harder to escape away from the list of EU. Though it’s very hard to bottom-line such incidents to zero, it’s possible to minimize them through initiative of every concerned authority.
Airport Security Division chief Buddhisagar Lamichhane on the talk with Karobar Daily media said that the government is focused on minimizing aerial accident. It’s not only due to the weak policy of Civil Aviation, there are various factors causing such accidents in Nepal. In some cases Airline companies are also the reason behind it. And in some cases there may be weakness of the authority but mostly in rural areas climate and geographical condition are the main cause.
US Bangla Dash 8 Q400 crash at Tribhuvan Int’l Airport
Various discussions have been made to make the regulatory body Civil Aviation Authority strong and much of them are on the process of dissemination he added. Further he disclosed that ministry has focused on infrastructure development to maintain safety and expected to remove Nepal from EU blacklist.
Adding up Veshraj Subedi, Air Security Department CAAN said we have been giving rules and directions to the Airlines companies to give enough training to the pilots and keep alternative flying crew for proper rest management to the pilots and since last time lots of changes have been seen and we are improvising it.
Malindo Air Boeing 737-900 incident at Tribhuvan Int’l Airport
Ex director of Nepal Civil Aviation Authority Ratishchandralal Suman said that the main thing to remove Nepal from EU blacklist is to minimize the rate of such incident and death. For that there should be good coordination among aircraft, pilot, control tower and the whole system. Furthermore poor implementation of the procedure and regulations should be cut off as soon as possible and given priority to strong execution and the one who disobeys such safety precaution should be charged, he added.
Ghanashyam Acharya spokesperson for Airlines Operator Association Nepal says change in air safety can be brought through collaboration of government and private sectors. In some case airline companies are also doing correction and authority has been conducting safety audit so this is also helping to maintain safety standard. We are very optimistic and hope this problem will sort out soon and no longer would we hear about such issues on Nepalese sky again.
