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Single Turbine Engine Aircraft
Is Two safer than One? No!

The State of Play

ICAO for comment, and further minor amendment, it was submitted to the Council for final approval. With the addition of a single word, and without dissent, it was agreed on 9 March 2005 and formally came into effect on November 24th 2005. Against this background, it is expected that the great majority of States will adopt something very close to the ICAO words (which, in general, are very similar to the JAA proposals, but with no requirement for available Landing Sites for flights over land).

Many countries around the world have approved SE-IMC operations. In Europe, for cargo only, this includes Denmark, Finland, France, Greece, Norway, Spain and Sweden. Based on the experience of passenger and cargo operations in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and the USA the following countries have now approved SE-IMC: Angola, Bahamas, China, Dominican Republic, the East Caribbean States, Ethiopia, French West Indies, Gabon, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, Kenya, Senegal, Suriname, Tanzania, Uganda, US Virgin Islands and Zambia. It is apparent that the countries approving SE-IMC already represent the majority of the world’s civil aviation activity. Concern has been expressed that most of these operations are over remote sparsely populated areas in good weather whereas operations in Europe would be over densely populated areas. Many SE-IMC operations are conducted throughout the USA and Canada and particularly in the North Eastern Seaboard of the USA which has a high density of population in Terminal Areas commensurate with European conurbations and weather at least as bad as Northern Europe. (Note: Details as to how to identify airports in densely populated areas and the volume of SE-IMC traffic are shown on the last page).

2. The JAA Situation

The JAA tasked their SE-IMC Working Group in March 2005 to suggest amendments to ensure compliance with ICAO’s Annex 6. This involved only 4 minor changes of no real consequence. Where the JAA requirements are more conservative, they can be left unchanged and are still ‘in compliance’. Some more conservative aspects in the JAA proposals, eg the use of limited ‘risk periods’ have been accepted by NAAs but as stated below these add little to ‘safety’.

The current proposals, more restrictive than the ICAO Standards or any other national regulations, have, over an 8 year period, been refined by four rounds of very extensive and comprehensive consultation. For this reason, and because the JAA rules would apply to 38 countries, the ICAO Working Group’s sub-group set up to draft the new Standards and Recommended Practices (SARPs) was directed by its Chairman to use the proposed Joint Aviation Regulations (JARs) as their starting point. The Australian, and, to a lesser extent, the Canadian rules had considerable similarity. The US rules were more lenient.

The draft JAR amendment passed through all of the rulemaking stages of the JAA without all of its national authorities being able to support the proposals. The differing positions of the Authorities were considered by the JAA Committee in July 2005 and, noting that some of the provisions impinged on