Israel slow on aviation reform
The vaunted Israeli airport security has come under criticism lately; the U.S. government has ranked Israel’s air safety among the world’s worst, lumping it with countries like Bangladesh, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti, and Zimbabwe; the reason: although Israel has never experienced an airport crash, experts say civil aviation in the country was neglected for decades, with authorities slow to renovate runways and introduce state-of-the-art instrument landing and radar technology; crowded airspace shared by civil and military flights further complicates matters
Israel’s heavily fortified international airport is considered by many to be the go-to place for airline security, with vehicle checks, robots, closed-circuit cameras, and controversial passenger profiling all helping to keep travelers safe from terror attacks.
Behind the reputation lie, well, troubled skies.
In a pair of mishaps, the Israeli air force scrambled warplanes to intercept commercial airliners suspected of being hostile aircraft. Some pilots fear an airliner could one day be shot down by mistake.
The downgrade in Israeli safety standards, reaffirmed late last year, was first issued in 2008, in the wake of two additional mishaps that could have resulted in accidents, said an Israeli aviation official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not permitted to discuss the issue with media.
“This is an international embarrassment for the civil aviation authority,” Giovanni Bisignani, the head of the International Air Transport Association (IATA), an industry umbrella group, said of the downgrade during a recent visit here.
Other warnings are coming from home.
Israel’s state watchdog agency recently accused the government of dragging its feet on implementing a safety panel’s recommendations to redress serious problems at Ben-Gurion International Airport.
Chief among them were outdated technology, runways that are too short, crowded air space used by both commercial airlines and the military, and a dysfunctional civil aviation authority.
AP notes that Bisignani visited Israel in November, in part to press the country to update its air safety practices — which stand in stark contrast to the sparkling new international airport that served a record 3.5 million tourists last year and a similar number of Israeli travelers. He told local officials that passengers should remain confident in the safety of Israel’s airlines — El Al, Israir, Arkia, and C.A.L. Cargo Airlines.
Bisignani also praised Israel’s “long history of leadership” on security — singling out its “pioneering work on behavior monitoring.” Other countries, like the United States, have balked at such methods, where inspectors question people who match suspicious profiles, often based on ethnic or racial background.
He took Israel to task, though, for not doing enough to address the problems that led the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration to downgrade it to the lower of two categories — ordinarily the province of the world’s least-developed nations.
The Category 2 ranking prevents Israeli airlines from
