“Did you truthfully buy your licence? Or did you earn it by working hard, gaining appropriate experience and then qualifying before an impartial board of examiners?”
Hugh Pryor
That’s one of the problems we’ve got in Africa today. During recent decades, the civil aviation authorities of many Third World countries have been run on the graft system. Not ‘Hard Graft’, as in hard work, but ‘graft’, as in; “How much money do you need to renew my Instrument Rating, without us having to actually fly a plane?”
You must have heard of P-51 time. That’s Parker 51, the people who make the pen. Not the ones who built the World War winning fighter. Not heard of it? Well, let’s put it like this. I do know of certain persons who could be open to accusations of, shall we just call it ‘Creative Logging’, possibly written with a Parker 51. It has been going on for years and years, of course, since the time that log books were invented.
I remember one particular person, for example, during my infant and impressionable years in aviation, who decided to transfer all his flying hours from civilian flying log books to Royal Air Force log books. The Air Force log books looked so much tidier, we were told. It took him quite some time to complete the task and maybe that was partly because he ended up with fifteen hundred hours more, after completing the exercise, than he had before he started it. And, guess what! That extra fifteen hundred gave him exactly the right number of hours to apply for a job with a certain large middle eastern airline. I think he must have only retired last year. Of course his cheating barred him from returning to Kenya, because everybody and his dog in Kenya knew what he had done, and would have spilt the beans if he had looked for employment in our neck of the woods.
The horrified board of inquiry into a recent major accident in Africa found that the captain of the aircraft, who sadly did not survive the disaster to defend himself, was found to have gained hundreds of hours each time he carried over the totals from the bottom of one page to the top of the next, in his log book. The co-pilot logged his time in a similar fashion, but this could not hide the fact that he had only one hour of formal training on the aircraft before the accident which took his life. The hours recorded in the aircraft technical logs bore no relation at all to those claimed by either of the pilots.
So how did they manage to get away with it?
Administrative slip up?
Administrative incompetence?
Why don’t we just try straight ‘Administrative corruption’?
To get to the bottom of this problem it is important to examine the root causes. So let’s have a look at some of them, and see why this insidious and corrosive disease is so contagious and difficult to control.
MOTIVATION
Let’s start right at the bottom, financially speaking.
Do you think that you would feel motivated to run the licensing office of a civil aviation authority, if your salary was twenty (yes…20) times less than those of the people whom you were responsible for regulating? Probably not.
Would you feel motivated if your salary had not been reviewed for over twenty (Yes… I did say 20) years? Probably not.
Would you feel motivated if you noticed that, in spite of the above, your bosses, who seldom graced the offices whose doors bore their names, suddenly became the proud owners of Seven Series BMWs, while you still took a jam-packed little minibus taxi to work every morning? I’ll bet you wouldn’t.
How about if the international community started muttering about your total incompetence and how they would like to beat the living daylights out of you and then see you in jail? Would that motivate you? I doubt it. In fact I think the opposite might be true.
Okay. Suppose I came to your office at around eleven o’clock one morning and suggested lunch at a discrete local pub for discussions about something which might be very much to your financial advantage. Then I took you out, filled you with beer, introduced you to a stunningly nubile and seemingly willing young lady or two and offered you a straight ten thousand dollars to licence the crew of an A310 that I wanted to operate to Europe, and, yes, of course the pilots are all well experienced. Well? Would you be interested?
NOW we’re talking!
The problem is that if you agree to my proposition, then I’ve got you on a string. So next time I’ll only have to give you five hundred dollars, for the renewal, because you’re not going to go blabbing your mouth off to all and sundry about how I bought you, are you? No you are not. I’ll just deny it anyway, and where are your witnesses? Anyway, you could do with the extra five hundred, couldn’t you? And so could your new girlfriends. You are certainly not going to blow the whistle. This gravy train is going so fast now that you would probably be badly hurt, or even worse, if you tried to get off.
REPERCUSSIONS
Right. It’s all downhill from now on. Nice and easy. Freewheeling. No need for paperwork. No need for any work. Who’s interested anyway? Just sit back, enjoy the ride and wait for the big boys to admit who really runs the show. And they have made the pay much better now, of course. Not Seven-Series-BMW-much better yet, but the day will come when they really need something. That will be the time to turn the screws and find out how much the market will stand.
Then suddenly, one day, the past starts to catch up.
Two pilots, terrified by the fact that their qualifications are based on a financial transaction, not on hard work and experience, are forced into a corner by commercial and peer pressure, a deep dark corner with no way out. They are tasked for a flight which can realistically only end one way and they are not given the option of declining.
It takes them five attempts to get their large aircraft into the short primitive airstrip at their destination, but they have to get in, because they have a very senior government minister on board and he needs to talk to the people on the ground and the chief pilot has flattered them by telling them that they are the right guys for the job.
Forget the fact that they have never ever tried to land an aeroplane this size in 800 metres. Forget the fact that the book says it cannot be done. Forget the fact that these two pilots have never landed this aircraft on an unpaved surface before. Forget the fact that one of the aircraft’s engines did not belong to that particular type. In fact, just sit back and watch the Gravy Train, containing the ‘Financially Enhanced’ (we’re not allowed to say BRIBED nowadays) aviation authorities, thunder comfortably and unwittingly down the last bit of the hill and fall, together with the two frightened ‘pilots’ and everybody else in the plane, over the edge, into the gaping abyss.
That actual accident happened in early 2003, on take-off. The laws of aerodynamics ruthlessly swept aside the laws of the graft system and declared the inevitable verdict imposed by the laws of physics. You won’t believe it, but quite a number of people got out of the wreck, in spite of the fact that the plane cart wheeled obscenely, before ending, upside-down, on top of some unfortunate person’s house.
The Minister and the two frightened pilots did not survive.
SOLUTIONS
The next problem is… how to get the survivors out of the abyss. And how do you stop the next gravy train of bribery and corruption tumbling into the chasm?
Well, the first thing you have to do is to prevent other gravy trains getting started down the slope. As you know, stopping runaway trains normally involves quite a lot of wreckage. Wreckage very often comes blood-stained and the blood comes from wounds. Wounds have to be excised in order to expose clean flesh where the healing can take hold. The people who carry out the surgery must themselves be free of infection and in small close-knit communities, these people are sometimes almost impossible to lay hands on. If you can’t find the person locally, then the only option is to look elsewhere. The other very important thing to remember is that controlling runaway gravy trains is not a job for the faint-hearted. Skill, determination, enormous strength and, above all, courage are prerequisites for the job. Gravy trains kill. Ask any anti-Mafia judge in Italy. Vast quantities of fortitude are necessary and endless patience. There is no other way
Another thing to bear in mind. If you are looking for that hero and you walk into an office and find me sitting behind the desk, you’re in the wrong office!
