Ministry to map Sumatra’s flight routes

The Transportation Ministry says it will map pioneer flight routes in Sumatra and Kalimantan following the deaths of 18 people in the crash of a Nusantara Buana Air Casa 212-200 aircraft in Bahorok forest near Langkat, North Sumatra.

“We are planning to map the routes as we did in Papua to prevent more accidents in the future,” Diding Sunardi, the ministry’s airworthiness director, said on Monday.

Diding said the ministry was currently discussing the process of mapping the routes with related parties, such as airplane operators and pilots, to find safer routes and to determine emergency landing areas.

The ministry completed a similar 12-month mapping process in Papua earlier this year.

Twelve routes that were rated dangerous by the ministry, including the Pagai-Wamena and Timika-Mulia routes, have since been improved.

The National Transportation Safety Committee (KNKT) is investigating the cause of the crash of the plane, which was flying from Medan, North Sumatra, to Kutacane, Aceh.

Meanwhile, Indonesian pilots will be trained in November on how to fly through mountainous areas, based on the Tropical Mountainous Flying Training Manual, which was designed by the ministry and Civil Aviation Society Authority (CASA) of Australia.

“Building a culture of safety among pilots and operators is the most important thing, because discipline is the key for a safe flight environment,” Diding said.

He said that most Indonesian airports, especially those serving pioneer routes, did not have adequate navigation systems, such as ground facilitators and inertial navigation reference systems.

However, in the absence of those advanced systems, obeying existing standard operating procedures (SOP) would prevent accidents, he said.

“We are planning to sanction pilots who are overconfident in flying and fail to follow the SOPs. They will not be able to fly aircraft anymore,” he said.

The government, however, would not require new aircraft to install Ground Proximity Warning Systems (GPWS), citing cost reasons.

A GPWS, intended to alert pilots if an aircraft is in immediate danger of crashing into the ground, might be as expensive as a new aircraft, Diding said.

Separately, aviation expert Dudi Sudibyo said that smaller aircraft such as the CASA 212-200 did not need a GPWS, although larger aircraft did.

“We need to improve pilot skills and aircraft maintenance to prevent crashes,” he said on the telephone.

Dudi said that the pilots of the ill-fated plane should have returned to Medan after receiving bad-weather warnings from the Meteorology, Climatology, and Geophysics Agency (BMKG).

Strong winds in Bahorok, which often range from 14 to 40 kilometers per hour, created severe turbulence that the CASA 212 could not handle, he said. (nfo)