ON Thursday, it was reported that the Philippines had joined four other Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) member countries — Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and Thailand — in an agreement to share aviation safety data, which was hailed in a joint statement by the signatories as "a first-of-its kind initiative in the Asia-Pacific." As Southeast Asia is the world's fastest-growing air transport market, this would seem to be a progressive and relevant bit of cooperation. However, the terms of the agreement as described in the information made public so far raise questions about the usefulness of the pact.
The agreement was announced at the 59th Directors General of Civil Aviation Conference, which was held on October 14-18 in Lapu-Lapu City, Cebu. The data-sharing plan was originally proposed at the previous (58th) conference last year, but negotiation of the details took several months. The joint statement by the Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines and its counterpart agencies said that the plan should be implemented by the end of the year.
The stated purpose of the agreement is to share data that will allow civil aviation authorities "to identify safety hazards and trends, and develop mitigating measures to better manage safety risks." In order to accomplish this, the aviation authorities agreed on seven categories of data to be shared initially, implying that more may be added later. These include collision warnings; deviations from altitudes assigned by air traffic controllers; activation of warning systems on the ground; reports of severe air turbulence; reports of wind shear; bird strikes; and the carriage of dangerous goods.
All of the Asean countries are parties to what is called the Asean Multilateral Agreement on Air Services, which was signed in 2009. That agreement has two essential provisions, namely permitting each country's designated airlines overflight rights in the rest of the Asean countries and the right to land for nonrevenue purposes.
Agreements on commercial passenger or cargo service are separately formed between countries on a bilateral basis, since the Asean "open skies" agreement, known as the Asean Single Aviation Market — created more than a decade ago — has still not been completed. The Agreement on Air Services, however, provides a number of guidelines for how those bilateral agreements should be structured.
Thus, even without a more comprehensive, Asean-wide "open skies" framework, the Asean air transport sector is already significantly integrated, with enough cross-border activity taking place that a safety concern in one country is likely a safety concern for all. That, after all, was the stated rationale behind the newest data-sharing agreement. In that light, it is quite perplexing why the signatories to the agreement imposed two limitations that will apparently make the shared data almost completely useless.
First, the data is to be "de-identified," meaning that the identity of the airline or aircraft involved in an incident will be redacted. This seems to us to be not only unhelpful but potentially dangerous. For example, if a particular airline is involved in several similar safety incidents, the civil air authorities in every country that the airline visits or overflies would almost certainly want to subject that airline to closer scrutiny to ensure that it operates safely within their jurisdictions.
The second limitation is that the data, findings and recommendations from the analysis of shared data "shall not be used to support investigations of accidents and incidents, and shall not be used for punitive or enforcement purposes," according to the joint statement of the civil air authorities. This provision is, pending some more reasonable explanation from the concerned authorities, rather baffling.
To be sure, there may be some justification for the second part of that prohibition; for example, a country should not penalize an air carrier for a violation it committed in another country. However, if shared data cannot be used to support investigation of accidents and safety-related incidents, then what is the point of sharing it? The "investigation of accidents and incidents" is precisely how the responsible authorities "identify safety hazards and trends, and develop mitigating measures to better manage safety risks," so it would appear that this "first-of-its-kind" agreement is also noteworthy for contradicting itself.