VietNamNet Bridge – The committee underlined the reason at a review meeting chaired by the committee’s chairman and Deputy Prime Minister Hoang Trung Hai, for aviation activities in the January-June period in Hanoi on Monday.

Passengers prepare to proceed to another gate for boarding at Noi Bai airport in Hanoi after their flight to HCMC has been delayed for more than half an hour

More than 20% of the 85,000 flights operated by local airlines in the period were delayed while the ratio of canceled services was 3%.

Local airlines attributed their flight delays and cancellations to technical problems, poor seating arrangements for passengers, inefficient flight schedules and limited capacity of their flight planners among others.

These were the main causes of 72.7% of flight delays and cancellations in the period, heard the meeting.

Flight postponements and aborts also resulted from poor services and equipment at airports, ineffective air traffic controls, bomb hoaxes, passengers’ use of incorrect documents and failure to abide by flight safety instructions.

Representatives of Vietnam Airlines and VietJetAir said there were more flights delayed and canceled this month due to heavy rain, typhoons and the peak air travel season.

Addressing the issues related to flight delays and aborts as well as aviation security are among the key tasks of the committee.

Aviation safety incidents more frequent

The number of aviation incidents in Vietnam rose 28.5% in the first six months against the same period of last year, according to the Civil Aviation Authority of Vietnam (CAAV).

Aviation authorities said that apart from objective reasons, there were as many as 66 cases of technical errors, accounting for 46% of the total.

Human errors due to passengers’ failure to abide by aviation safety rules also increased to 14 from only four last year.

Errors by flight crews, technicians, air traffic controllers and flight regulators made up three-fourths of the serious incidents.

For example, a Jetstar Pacific aircraft leaving HCMC for Vinh City last Wednesday failed to communicate with Vinh airport for four minutes. An air traffic controller in charge happened to switch off the communication channel, forcing the flight to circle around the airport for about 10 minutes.

A Vietnam Airlines aircraft a month earlier nearly collided with another of Jetstar Pacific due to wrong orders by a Danang Airport air traffic controller. The incident was immediately discovered and handled.

VietJetAir last month mistakenly transported passengers from Hanoi to Cam Ranh Airport instead of Dalat City. Failure of crew and flight coordinators to follow flight operation procedures was behind the wrong landing.

Previously at the end of March, a cover protecting the brakes fell off a plane en route from Dalat to HCMC because technicians had not observed the examination process thoroughly.

Statistics from CAAV said the number of incidents caused by technical errors went down last year owing to better examination and maintenance but the number of cases caused by human errors nearly doubled that in 2012.

SGT/VNN