EU unmoved by PAL pleas to lift ban

First posted 21:59:57 (Mla time) July 19, 2010
Paolo Montecillo
Philippine Daily Inquirer

THE EUROPEAN Union (EU) has refused to remove the Philippines from a list of countries whose airlines are banned from flying to the continent due to the lack of substantial industry-wide reforms in their local aviation sector.

Philippine Airlines said it was able to convince EU officials that PAL was of international standards. However, the company’s pleas to be excluded from the ban fell on deaf ears.

“We made a presentation to the EU last June and we were able to convince them that we are a safe airline,” PAL president and chief operating officer Jaime J. Bautista said in a recent interview.
“But they told us they were sorry and they could not give in to our request to be taken out of the blacklist,” he said.

The ban stemmed from a recent audit by the International Civil Aviation Organization (Icao), whose officials raised “serious safety concerns” over the state of the country’s aviation sector.
Particularly, the Icao pointed out the lack of professionalism within the Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines (CAAP), which was tasked to make sure that local airlines were safe to fly.
Following the poor grade received from Icao, Philippine carriers were thrown into a blacklist of airlines banned from flying to Europe.

The CAAP, now under the leadership of former Manila airport manager Alfonso Cusi, has started to implement reforms since then, including the grounding of several aircraft found to have fallen short of international safety norms.

Bautista said that although PAL has no flights to Europe at the moment, the ban kept the airline from making plans to revive operations in the continent. Before being forced into rehabilitation in the late 1990s, PAL used to have flights to popular cities like London, Rome and Paris.

Bautista likewise said that as a result of the ban, European travel agencies have stopped selling PAL tickets to tourists who may want to take the flag carrier to visit attractions in the Philippines.
PAL is also the only local airline that has the aircraft capable of going on long-haul flights to Europe.
Aside from the EU ban, the Philippines was also downgraded to a category 2 status by the US Federal Aviation Authority (FAA). Again, the low grade only affected PAL, being the only airline that flies to North America.