Mozambique Airline Awarded Safety Certificate

Mozambique national airlines, LAM, has been awarded a safety certificate by the International Air Transport Association (IATA) after undergoing the Operational Safety Audit (OISA), APA has learned Friday.

IOSA is a program that began five years ago, and to-date 570 audits have been conducted.

IATA states that IOSA “is an internationally recognized and accepted evaluation system designed to assess the operational management and control systems of an airline. IOSA uses internationally recognized quality audit principles and is designed to conduct audits in a standardized and consistent manner.”

It checks 928 standards and recommended practices. Airlines that do not comply with the recommendation of an IOSA audit, risk losing IATA membership and all the benefits that go with it.

Since IOSA was introduced in 2003, there has been a decline of almost 50 percent in aircraft accidents across the globe, according to IATA.

“Out of the 15 member states of the Southern African Development Community (SADC), only six (Mozambique, South Africa, Madagascar, Mauritius, Seychelles and Tanzania) have at least one airline that is IOSA certified,” LAM said.

Some national carriers, such as TAAG of Angola and Royal Swazi of Swaziland, are already banned from European airspace on safety grounds, and the same could happen to Air Zimbabwe if it does pass the IOSA audit very soon, aviation sources said.

Mozambique’s national flag carrier recently announced that it will invest US$120 million in the acquisition of six aircraft by 2011. LAM is 80 percent state-owned, with the remaining 20 percent in the hands of its employees operating scheduled services in southern Africa and one inter-continental flight to Lisbon, Portugal.

The airliner, which last made profits in 1999, was established in August 1936 — making it one of the oldest existing African Airline.

Source African Press Agency

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