The Tribune

By NEIL HARTNELL

Tribune Business Editor

nhartnell@tribunemedia.net

A Cabinet minister yesterday revealed he is pushing for a "threshold mechanism" to address a regulatory "quirk" that aids rogue pilots in the Bahamian aviation industry.

Dionisio D'Aguilar, minister of tourism and aviation, told Tribune Business he was eyeing a system where the number of monthly flights was used to determine whether a pilot was offering commercial services and carrying paying passengers.

Disclosing that he had instructed the Bahamas Civil Aviation Authority (BCAA) to deal with the problems posed by so-called hackers "once and for all", Mr D'Aguilar said a benchmark related to flight frequency was required to eliminate what he described as a regulatory loophole.

The Minister explained that the pilots themselves are responsible for determining, and declaring, the purpose of a flight, describing this as "a problem that needs to be addressed" given that it provides obvious cover for "hackers" and illegal charter operators that lack the necessary licences.

"There is this kind of quirk in the regulations that allows the pilot to determine the purpose of the transport, and if the people they are flying are for commercial gain or not," Mr D'Aguilar told Tribune Business.

"If you are flying for commercial reasons, there is a greater level of regulation. We want people engaged in that business to be properly licensed and declare them. The fact the pilot gets to decide if they're flying for commercial purposes or not is a problem that needs to be addressed."

Some observers will likely call for the regulations to be changed rather than introducing new systems, but Mr D'Aguilar continued: "I've always said we may need to develop, after consultation with the industry, what is the number of flights that classifies as qualifying as commercial?

"If you fly under 10 flights per month, that makes sense, but if you're flying more than that you qualify as a commercial operator. There's got to be some sort of mechanism to measure that. Where I think some abuse has occurred is you can make many flights, and unscrupulous hackers say we're just doing this for friends and family.

"If they decide to be unscrupulous we need to come up with a mechanism that measures that, and says when you've reached a certain threshold you must be classified as commercial; you cannot be making these flights all for non-commercial reasons."

Mr D'Aguilar spoke out in the wake of Friday's BCAA press conference, where the aviation sector regulator revealed its plans to crack down on rogue operators within the industry. It has come under increasing pressure to act following January's fatal plane crash off Mastic Point, Andros, which resulted in the loss of six lives.

The incident highlighted problems relating to a lack of enforcement and oversight within the aviation industry, after it emerged that the pilot involved lacked the necessary licences to offer charter services to paying passengers.

Captain Charles Beneby, the BCAA'S director-general, unveiled a number of planned measures but did not include the "number of flights" benchmark mechanism described by Mr D'Aguilar. He did, though, note the difficulties encountered by the regulator in proving that a pilot was illegally offering commercial flights.

"What makes it challenging is the fact that we are asserting that they are operating, that they are flying for hire," he said. "The practice is that the operator would frequently say, 'this is my cousin', 'this is my sister', 'this is my family'. And then, those persons that are flying with these people, are reluctant to come forward to say 'I paid'."

Mr D'Aguilar, though, said the BCAA was "moving slowly to that goal" of a per flights benchmark to determine if a pilot is offering commercial services, while acknowledging that "collusion" between pilot and passengers often made it difficult to prove law-breaking.

"No matter how much family you have, you're not going to be flying hundreds of flights per month because you love your family," he told Tribune Business. "We need to develop a threshold and hold people accountable for this threshold. I have been asking the BCAA, and been constantly harping on this, let's deal with this problem once and for all."

Mr D'Aguilar said the BCAA was still in its infancy as a regulator, and was "in a period of transition" following its creation out of the Civil Aviation Department (CAD) in November 2016.

While the BCAA is now "20 months into this journey", the Minister said its development required the regulator to now focus on and deal with issues such as illegal "hacking".

"I'm pushing for there to be a regime in place that does two things," Mr D'Aguilar told Tribune Business. "One, it really disincentivises people from hacking, but two, it provides a system for them to regularise themselves in an efficient and timely manner.

"People don't regularise for two reasons. One, because no one is forcing them to do so, and two, when they attempt to do so it's too bureaucratic and too slow." He added that this has to be addressed through a combination of enforcement and efficient licensing.

Emphasising that he wanted to "speed up" the process for persons seeking to obtain the necessary pilot and aircraft licences, Mr D'Aguilar added: "It's not my intention to drive people out of business; it's my intention to drive them to operate within the confines of the law."

The BCAA on Friday unveiled initiatives requiring Bahamian pilots holding foreign licences to apply for Bahamian licences; a public education air safety campaign; and the creation of a multi-agency law enforcement task force.

"We are amending the regulations to require all Bahamian citizens holding foreign-issued licences to apply to the Authority to have those licences converted to a Bahamian licence," Captain Beneby said. "The benefit of that is to ensure that they come under our scrutiny."

He added that the regulations are being amended to require all foreign-registered aircraft in the Bahamas to be registered with the Authority "if those aircraft are in the country for more than a specified period of time".

"That information would reflect ownership of the aircraft, airworthiness of aircraft, information about the pilots and the operator of that aircraft," Mr Beneby said. "Unfortunately…. a number of flights are being performed with foreign aircraft that ordinarily we would not scrutinise."

The success of the BCAA's efforts, as ever, is likely to boil down to its will to enforce the laws and regulations, and whether it has sufficient manpower and expertise to do so across 28 airports spread the length and breadth of the Bahamas.