‘Safer Skies initiative integral to preventing shooting down of civilian aircraft’

President of the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) council, Salvatore Sciacchitano, has described as crucial Canada’s Safer Skies initiative as a means to avoid recurrence of the shooting down of civilian aircraft, even as he called on states to rev up the political momentum around implementation and exchange of expertise.

The third Safer Skies forum was convened by the governments of Canada and The Netherlands in support of progress “towards preventative conflict zone risk management practices,” and took place in Rotterdam and The Hague on June 5 and 6.

Canada’s Safer Skies initiative was launched as a direct response to the shooting down of Ukraine International Airlines flight PS 752, bound for Kyiv on January 8, 2020, shortly after take-off from Tehran, which resulted in the loss of 176 lives.

The ICAO president recalled how Korean Airlines flight 007, with 269 passengers and crew on board, was shot down on August 31, 1983 by a military aircraft of the former Soviet Union.

He noted that in the aftermath of this event, the ICAO Assembly amended the 1944 Chicago Convention to provide that every state must refrain from the use of weapons against civil aircraft in flight, but that “notwithstanding this almost 40-year-old commitment by states, we continue to see instances involving the use of weapons against civil aircraft in flight.”

Expressing ICAO’s gratitude to Canada and The Netherlands for organising and hosting the event, the ICAO president remarked that “at this event, we have an exceptional and crucially important opportunity to ramp up the political momentum and enhance exchanges of technical expertise fostering the global cooperation that will underpin the implementation of the Safer Skies initiative.”

The ICAO leader highlighted that “The downing of an aircraft with innocent passengers and crew on board is absolutely unacceptable, the result of ineffective civil-military coordination, limited exchange of information, including a lack of intelligence information and ultimately human error.”

He also focused on the high importance ICAO places on addressing the risks that conflict zones pose to civil aviation, which must be assessed by both states and operators and expressed the organisation’s “full and unwavering” support for their activities in this area.

The initiative has been welcomed and appreciated by the ICAO Council and subsequently endorsed by the ICAO Assembly.

“Commitment is of course key to the prevention of a similar event from ever happening again,” Mr Sciacchitano said, noting that “the shooting down of flight PS 752 was very regrettably not the first or only instance of its kind.”

Following these proposals, the ICAO Accident Investigation Panel has been working on concerns expressed about investigations on the downing of aircraft, particularly when the independence of the Accident Investigation Authority and credibility of the investigation could be challenged.