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31 308 The Amman Speech on november 3, 1997, Jordan’s minister of transport greeted Pierre Jeanniot in person as he disembarked from his plane, with all the protocol reserved for highly placed diplomats. The fifty-third General Assembly of iata members was taking place that year in Amman, Jordan’s capital. It was, in fact, in the Levantine country that the director general and ceo of the organization had chosen to announce his ambitious, three-part program.56 What no one knew, yet, was that in this place and under official auspices, Pierre Jeanniot was about to attack, no holds barred, the great taboo of civil aviation at that time: airline security. He also had in his sights two thorny questions : inadequate infrastructures at airports, the source of many flight delays and long line-ups for the passengers; and his other perennial hobby horse: the environment.57 This three-pronged program had been in preparation for some time, and in all three cases, his tools were to be Operations Research and common sense, working in concert. Now he had to announce it with as much flair as possible, so it would be heard loud and clear around the world. Where airline security was concerned, the numbers were disastrous. Before 1977 there was approximately one airplane accident, somewhere on the planet, every two weeks. According to the calculations of the working group Pierre Jeanniot had set up at iata two years earlier, if things were let to slide, and considering the increase predicted in the number of flights around the world,n within ten years there would be more than one accident per week. This situation was intolerable to him, not only from the human point of view, but also because of the harm being done to the airline industry globally. Indeed, in July 2008, Agence France-Presse reported that air traffic had increased by nearly 4.8 billion people. The largest hike in passenger traffic was recorded in the Middle East, followed by Africa and the Asia-Pacific region. Atlanta remained the largest airport in the world in terms of passenger traffic, with more than 89 million people, followed by Chicago’s O’Hare (76 million) and London (68 million). Some voices within iata urged him, however, to keep silent on the subject. It was best not to awaken the sleeping monster and seem to be criticizing some members of criminal negligence, if one did not want insurance companies to hike their rates, giving as a pretext the guilty behaviour of their clients. Pierre Jeanniot replied by insisting that not only was he going to talk about accidents, he was going to deal with the problem head-on. iata was going to put in place a program of accreditation whereby, if a company did not respect the technical norms that had been established, it would be threatened with expulsion . The working group had been mandated to do an exhaustive study of different categories of accidents, their nature, their causes, their consequences, the companies involved and the locations and frequency of their occurrence. They had also analyzed the landing conditions at airports and the role of navigation services. The statistics were eloquent. It was clear that certain parts of the world posed a problem. In Africa, for example, which accounted for less than three percent of world flight volume and passengers per kilometre, the percentage of accidents ran as high as twenty-seven percent: an incriminating ratio. Box 5 the amman speech Excerpts from the original version* issues To achieve our growth potential will require much more than a continuously healthy economic climate, and you will be discussing three issues at this agm that are fundamental to the future of the industry. No other issues are more important. Let me illustrate. Our safety record will determine how the travelling public perceives us, and whether they want to fly. Is anyone here prepared to witness one air accident per week by the year 2010, a situation we are likely to face with our traffic volume doubling every ten years, if we do not tackle the problem of our static accident rate? Of course we cannot accept such a vision of the future! So as an interim measure we aim to halve the accident rate as measured by hull losses, by 2004. This is iata’s most important strategic objective; the credibility of our industry is at stake. But this is something that needs the close cooperation of airlines, airframe 309 The...

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