The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) will carry out an audit of the Mexican aviation sector which, unlike the one carried out by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) between October 2020 and February 2021, will cover all annexes of the Convention on International Civil Aviation, with which items such as aeronautical charts, aeronautical telecommunications, as well as the design and operation of airports will be evaluated.
The ICAO audit is planned for November, and is projected to complement the evaluation carried out by the FAA –which led to the downgrading of aviation safety from Category 1 to Category 2–, which covers three annexes of the so-called Chicago Convention: personnel licenses, aircraft operation and airworthiness.
“We hope that this, which is being done to recover Category 1, will help both audits,” Melvin Cintron, ICAO regional director for North America, Central America and the Caribbean, told the media during Aviation Week, organized by the College of Aviator Pilots of Mexico. “Ours is going to be much more extensive.”
Among the annexes that will be evaluated in the ICAO audit, and that were not considered in the FAA review, is Annex 4, corresponding to aeronautical navigation charts; annex 10, referring to aeronautical communications, and annex 14, corresponding to the design and operation of airports and heliports.
The ICAO audit is independent of the one carried out by the FAA, so although they have points in common, they do not interfere with each other. However, the work that is done to comply with the observations made by the FAA in its audit will contribute to the evaluation that ICAO will make.
Hence, in this review, the performance of authorities such as the Federal Civil Aviation Agency (AFAC) and the Secretariat of Infrastructure, Communications and Transportation (SICT) itself, as well as agencies created for the operation of new airports, such as the case of the Secretary of National Defense (Sedena), which operates the new Felipe Ángeles International Airport (AIFA) through a state body of the same name.
However, Citron emphasized that ICAO will not evaluate the airports as such, but rather the bodies that operate and supervise them, who are also responsible for certifying the complexes.
“ICAO does not certify airports. What we do is see that the authority has the capacity, the resources, everything necessary to certify its airports, including qualified personnel, of course. So, when we talk about an airport certification, it is the one that has to be carried out by the authority, the AFAC”.
Although the FAA audit is not yet complete, ICAO does not plan to postpone its year-end assessment, which is expected to take about two weeks after preliminary work.
In the event that the result of the ICAO audit is not favorable to the Mexican authorities, Cintron said that, contrary to the adjustment made by the FAA – a downgrade to category 2, which prevents Mexican airlines from opening new routes and placing more capacity to the United States–, the effects would translate into a poor perception abroad of the Mexican air sector.
“The consequences are more global in that other countries then know the level of compliance that a country has, and if it is something extremely degrading in terms of compliance,” said the ICAO director. “No country prohibits its citizens from traveling, but they provide information so that their citizens make an educated decision (…) The consequence is that: the other 193 member countries [of ICAO] will know the level of compliance [of Mexico]”.
