Air Uganda plane at the Entebbe International Airport. The carrier is
one of those grounded by the Uganda Civil Aviation Authority. FILE
PHOTO
By Wolfgang H Thome
In Summary
- Leading aviators in Uganda are in agreement that trust and honest co-operation have been severely damaged if not destroyed for years to come and that they, as many in the public domain, expect a major house cleaning at the UCAA head office in coming weeks and months to provide a fresh start and a new personnel platform from where trust can slowly be restored.
June 17, 2014 will be remembered in Ugandan
aviation circles as a day of infamy, when the Uganda Civil Aviation
Authority (UCAA) grounded all locally registered airlines from flights
beyond the country’s borders; amended, in some cases backdated, existing
Air Operator Certificates and in other cases withdrew them.
The instant withdrawal of the AOC, as has happened
to not one but three airlines, would ordinarily be a result of a series
of safety and other regulatory violations. It wasn’t.
Neither was there any case made to any of them
about an imminent threat to the public interest. Worse, no appeal
process was allowed.
Subsequent public utterances attributed to the
UCAA were instantly dismissed as poorly disguised attempts to hide the
fact that at the end of an International Civil Aviation Organisation
audit they were faced with being cited with Significant Safety Concerns.
By the authorities withdrawing all AOCs for
international flights, the ICAO’s jurisdiction became limited as
domestic operations fall under the purview of the national regulators
alone.
In letters addressed to airlines, UCAA cited the
2014 Regulations for the action. But the statutory instrument in fact
was only gazetted on July 11, weeks later.
This raises a legally important point to which the
regulators are yet to respond. A source at UCAA claimed that
“internally” they had agreed on the new regulations way back in May, and
conceded that the airlines were not informed at the time of the new set
of regulations coming into effect, but would not explain the loophole
of the UCAA citing the new regulations as a foundation for their action
before they were gazetted and the statutory instrument signed.
The UCAA mouthpieces then stepped up the war of
words, accusing airlines of failed safety standards, a highly
unprocedural if not outright unethical way of doing business to start
with — such concerns must be communicated to the airlines in writing and
the June 17 letter did not contain any such allegations.
Repeated interaction with the airlines soon made
it obvious that the stories peddled by the regulators did not hold water
and when the media finally caught on to the fact that they had been
misused to disguise the truth, things began to crumble for the UCAA.
Panic set in at the head office when the options
of legal action were raised against both the authority and key
individuals there. No one believed their version that ICAO had audited
the airlines, as ICAO only deals with member state aviation bodies and
not individual airlines.
In conversations at the end of July with two
Kajjansi-based operators, a senior manager at UCAA, when challenged on
the legality of retrospectively amending AOCs to prohibit flights across
national borders, said “The withdrawal of the international flights was
done (a) in the public interest and (b) because it was an emergency.
"The reasoning here was that if Uganda failed the
audit, then it would be embarrassing for the the country, and therefore,
the public interest was best served by avoiding this embarrassment. It
was also deemed an emergency because it would be very embarrassing.” A
UCAA board meeting eventually took place at the beginning of August.
Time to look at some of the facts as they are now known.
The ICAO audit found several shortcomings within
the UCAA structures as recorded in the June 17 letter to the airlines.
The audit failures were as follows: The air operator certification as
established by the Authority was not reflected in the operator’s
processes and procedures.
Insufficient industry surveillance to enable the Authority to identify shortcomings and the operator to correct non-compliances.
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