Indonesia's Adam Air banned from flying: air chief
JAKARTA (AFP) — Indonesian budget airline Adam Air has been banned from flying on safety grounds, the country's chief of air transport said Tuesday.
"The transport ministry has decided to revoke Adam Air's operational specification, effective 12:00 am Wednesday (1700 GMT Tuesday)," Budhi Muliawan Suyitno told reporters here.
"With this, Adam Air is banned from operating its aircraft. All of its planes must be automatically grounded."
Suyitno said the decision to remove the beleaguered airline's permission to fly was based on the results of a quarterly safety evaluation, which found it made "violations that could put passengers' safety at risk."
The airline would be grounded until it was evaluated again in another three months, and would have its air operator certificate -- a separate safety certification -- permanently removed if no improvements were found. This would therefore move the company a step closer to permanent closure.
The decision comes in the wake of financial turmoil at the airline after its latest safety incident, which saw an Adam Air Boeing 737-400 with 175 people on board skid off the runway in foul weather in Batam last week.
That prompted a private consortium led by PT Bhakti Investama to unload its 50 percent stake in the airline, citing dissatisfaction with its safety performance, leading the cash-strapped airline to cut the number of flights it was operating down to a fraction of usual.
"I'm not surprised with the (transport ministry's) decision. We are having an internal problem that could affect our employees' morale and performance and would have a bad impact on our safety efforts," Adam Air president Adam Aditya Suherman told AFP.
"We actually had planned to stop operations starting from today (Tuesday). Apart from safety reasons, (state fuel monopoly) Pertamina had also stopped supplying fuel to us."
Asked if the company would attempt to improve its safety standards in the next three months to head off closure, Suherman said: "That depends on the shareholders."
Suherman was quoted as saying by the Media Indonesia newspaper earlier Tuesday that the airline could be forced to suspend all operations within two days due to a failure to meet a deadline for payments on insurance policies.
The chairman said the airline was likely not in a position to insure its entire fleet.
The flight ban now also leaves unresolved a government deadline reportedly given earlier this week allowing the airline 21 days to decide whether to start servicing routes or close down.
Adam Air has seen a string of serious safety incidents since its launch in 2003. A plane went missing off Sulawesi island on New Year's Day last year with 102 people on board. The wreckage of what is believed to be the missing aircraft was later found in the Makassar Strait.
And the fuselage of another Adam Air jet fractured in two on landing in the eastern Javanese city of Surabaya February last year, but no one was killed.
