Nepal’s non-compliance with Icao standards rated 45pc

KATHMANDU, APR 12 - The International Civil Aviation Organization (Icao) has given Nepal’s non-compliance with Icao standards a rating of 45 percent. The global average for non-compliance is 38 percent. The failure of the Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal (Caan) to strengthen aviation safety oversight mechanism has been blamed for Nepal’s being put in the bad books of the United Nations aviation watchdog.

The score is based on the audit results of the Universal Safety Oversight Audit Programme (USOAP) as of February. Caan plans to invite a re-validation mission in February 2015 to review the corrective action plan enforced to address safety deficiency.  

Icao monitors Nepal’s aviation safety oversight capabilities through the ICAO Coordinated Validation Missions (ICVM). A mission had arrived in Nepal in July last year to validate the corrective measures taken by Nepal to address and resolve the deficiencies pointed out by the global aviation watchdog in 2009. The mission carried out an on-site audit from July 10-16, 2013.

Although Caan had expected the non-compliance rate to come down to the global average when it was asked for comments by Icao in December last year on the improvements it had made immediately after the on-site audit, the global aviation regulator did not consider modifying the preliminary audit records.

Ratish Chandra Lal Suman, director general of Caan, said that Nepal’s score on the audit report was not revised as Caan was not able to send the progress report after July.

“There has been significant progress particularly in the primary legislation part since then.” He added that Caan

had been working on a number of “off-site” validation and sending the progress report through an online framework to Icao.

“The corrective action plan on the primary legislation has almost been completed while there has been improvements in other indicators too,” said Suman, adding that the current improvement would help to bring down the non-compliance rate to 30 percent.

Caan said that the non-compliance rate would be reduced to better than the world average as it was in the process of passing a number of bills that had remained pending due to the absence of Parliament earlier. In 2009, Nepal’s rate of non-compliance with the eight areas audited by Icao was 57 percent compared to the world average of 41 percent.

The eight critical elements which Icao considers are essential for a country to have effective air safety are primary aviation legislation, organization, licensing, operations, airworthiness, accident investigation, air navigation services and aerodromes.

The effective implementation of each audit area is rated from 0 percent to 100 percent, with 0 percent being “not implemented” and 100 percent being “fully implemented”.  

Icao has grave concerns about Nepal’s air safety, and has placed it among the 12 worst performing nations. They are Botswana, Kazakhstan, Congo, Sao Tome and Principe, Angola, Djibouti, Eritrea, Haiti, Lebanon, Malawi and Papua New Guinea, according to a report posted on Icao’s website. Nepal has been red-flagged on “operations” among the eight critical elements. “In August 2013, Icao has identified a significant safety concern with respect to the ability of Nepal to properly oversee its airlines

(air operators) under its jurisdictions,” Icao said. Nepal’s rate of non-compliance on the operations front is 51.69

percent compared to the

global average of 66.04 percent. In legislation, Nepal has scored 31.82 percent compared to the world average of 66.67 percent.

Besides operations, the audit report shows that Nepal has performed poorly on the organization and accident investigation fronts with the non-compliance rate being recorded at 38.46 percent and 20.41 percent respectively. The global averages for these two elements are 63.67 percent and 53.86 percent respectively.

However, the non-compliance rate with regard to licensing (68.67 percent), airworthiness (74.55 percent), air navigation services (51.53 percent) and aerodromes (68.84 percent) compares well with the world average.

Icao audit report (as of Feb)

Critical Elements    Effective Implementation     Global Average

Legislation    31.82%    66.67%

Organization    38.46%    63.67%

Licensing    68.67%    71.29%

Operation    51.69%    65.77%

Airworthiness    74.55%    72.73%

Accident Investigation    20.41%    53.86%

Air Navigation    51.53%    54.93%

Aerodromes    68.84%    57.81%

Source: The Kathmandu Post