Philippines Aviation NEWS: PAL backs liberalization of aviation sector

MANILA, Philippines (PNA) — Philippine Airlines (PAL) on Thursday expressed support to the call of the Aquino administration to liberalize the country's aviation sector.

"We welcome President's vision to promote a competitive international aviation sector anchored on "a strong Philippine-based aviation industry", which we firmly believe is indispensable to the development of Philippine tourism, trade and economic progress." PAL president Jaime Bautista said.

As the national flag carrier, Bautista said, PAL would continue to work in partnership with government to attract more foreign visitors from both existing and new markets overseas.

"PAL has always led the way in promoting RP tourism, by being the most aggressive airline in pioneering new routes, serving key tourism markets, and making necessary investments to put the Philippines on the tourism map as a destination for the world," he said.

In 2011, PAL will launch a new route to New Delhi, India, opening up the Philippines to the potentially enormous market of Indian tourists, in the same way that it had done in past years by pioneering new routes from Korea, Japan, China, Canada, and the United States.

PAL is the only airline flying between the Philippines and Canada, Tokyo (to/from Cebu), Western Japan, Las Vegas, Melbourne, and nonstop from the U.S. West Coast – all rich sources of tourist traffic.

PAL flies 2.9 million seats into the Philippines every year, more than any other airline operating to and from the Philippines.

PAL operates more seats and more flights from China, Japan, Australia, Indonesia, Vietnam, and the United States to the Philippines than any other airline.

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Philippines seeks removal from aviation blacklists

MANILA — The Philippines hopes soon to be removed from blacklists of countries deemed to have unsafe aviation, paving the way for its flag carrier to add US flights and return to Europe, a regulator said Friday.

Philippine airlines were stopped from expanding services to the United States in 2008 and banned from Europe in March this year over concerns airline safety was not being overseen according to international standards.

An International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) inspection team will visit Manila next month and be told the government has complied substantially with 87 of 89 listed deficiencies, chief industry regulator Alfonso Cusi said.

The United States' Federal Aviation Authority and the European Union both take guidance from the ICAO.

"It's a matter of time before we are out of the blacklist," Cusi told reporters, adding that the government had addressed the most critical issues raised in the ICAO's last safety audit.

These included problems with the Philippines' aviation regulatory framework and the quality of staff.

Lax surveillance of schools that train pilots, some of them foreigners from the Middle East, India, Afghanistan and Sudan, was another problem.

The two outstanding items are completion of the training of the new civil aviation authority's inspectors, and computerisation of the agency, which has been held up as contracts are still under review.

Cusi did not say when the final two problems would be rectified.

But the next audit of the US agency, the FAA, will be in the first three months of 2011, and the Philippines is hoping it will be lifted from the US blacklist after that, according to Cusi.

After the US FAA downgraded the Philippines to "Category 2" from "Category 1", parliament passed a law creating the Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines to regulate the industry.

Cusi, the new body's first director-general, said the ICAO, the FAA and the European Union air safety committee had acknowledged the progress made over the past two years.

He said removal from US and EU blacklists would allow Philippine Airlines to resume flights to Europe for the first time since the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s.

Cusi said PAL also wanted to add to its US service, now limited to the US west coast and Hawaii.

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