THE Indonesia Ministry of Transportation has retracted its decision to freeze TransNusa Air Services and Garuda Indonesia, two of five operators sanctioned last week for flying without route permits.
Ignasius Jonan, minister of transportation had last Friday announced the termination of 61 flights operated by Garuda Indonesia, Lion Air, Wings Air, TransNusa Air Services and Susi Air for the breach.
Jonan revealed: “Garuda (has) four (affected flights), Lion Air 35, Wings Air 18, TransNusa one, and Susi Air three.”
He added that sanctions have also been applied to officials involved in the violation.
In response, Bayu Sutanto, managing director, TransNusa, issued a statement to clarify that the airline has a full seven-day service between Denpasar and Labuan Bajo under two permits issued on September 10 and October 6, 2014 respectively.
“With the valid route permit issued by the civil aviation authority, TransNusa has the right to fly daily, therefore, the accusation that TransNusa flights are operated on different days than what is stated in the route permit is nonsense…the audit process was not done thoroughly and carefully,” he said in the statement, adding that this would impact the airline’s reputation.
“We expect the Ministry of Transportation to be brave to make corrections on its inaccurate decision or announcement made (earlier),” he said.
Garuda Indonesia also issued a statement that the affected route is Makassar-Jeddah via Medan and its return flight.
Garuda’s vice president for corporate communications, Pujobroto, said: “We do have the route permits on the domestic and international sectors, but the flights used two different flight numbers for Makassar-Medan (GA626) and Medan-Makassar (GA986).
“Garuda has submitted a revision to change to use one flight number GA988 (on the outbound flight) and 987 (on the inbound) effective January 1.”
However, the aviation authority found the airline still operating with two flight numbers.
Julius Barata, spokesperson of the Ministry of Transportation was quoted by Tempo.com as having confirmed that TransNusa’s clarification has been investigated by the Flight Route Operation Audit and Evaluation Team and that the airline’s operation is legitimate.
He added that Garuda has finalised its permit and corrected its flight number.
Meanwhile, in their respective statements Lion Air Group and Susi Air have said they would study the said violated flights and would reapply for the permits accordingly.
Jonan had also said that flight slots and route permits would be tracked through an online system expected to start running this month. “An online system will eliminate direct interactions between the aviation regulation authority and the airline operators,” he said.
The Ministry of Transport’s crack down on airlines running foul of aviation regulations comes in the wake of Indonesia AirAsia’s QZ8501 which had disappeared in bad weather on December 28 with some 162 people on board. It was found that the carrier did not have a permit to fly the Surabaya-Singapore route.
Meanwhile, the BBC has reported that Indonesian divers have retrieved the flight data recorder of the ill-fated plane. The cockpit voice recorder, the second part of the black box, has also been identified but not retrieved as yet.
