The Tribune

By RASHAD ROLLE

Tribune Staff Reporter

rrolle@tribunemedia.net

SMALL countries like the Bahamas are challenged to build capacity needed to provide search and rescue services that meet international standards, Tourism and Aviation Minister Dionisio D’Aguilar said yesterday.

He spoke following the release of the final report into the November 8, 2018 plane crash of Byron Ferguson, 34.

“I agree with the report,” Mr D’Aguilar said.

In view of the incident the Air Accident Investigation Department called on the government to comply with Annex 12 of the Convention on the International Civil Aviation, which calls for designating an appropriate entity to perform search and rescue services, granting the Bahamas Civil Aviation Authority the power to provide oversight of that entity and establishing a rescue coordination centre to support rescue services.

“We attempted to address a number of those issues through the passage of the Air Accident Authority Act 2019,” Mr D’Aguilar said.

“Much of that Act was provided by the ICAO annexes and were certainly suggested by Mr Delvin Major (the air accident investigation chief) and he was very much involved in the construct of that Act. Obviously small countries are always challenged by the costs of providing many of the mechanisms that are readily available and in place in first world nations that have the tax base to address these issues and unfortunately it isn’t until an event like what happened to Mr Ferguson that we bring focus to bear on them.

“Then you are always resource challenged to address these issues and you almost have to make this a function of someone who has another function because we don’t have the resources for one agency to deal with that one incident that happens maybe once or twice a year and nobody is not sitting down waiting to do that. What we can cost-effectively afford is to make this the function of some other agency but bring the training that was identified to be lacking to that agency.”

Mr Ferguson’s family has launched judicial review proceedings over the search and rescue effort.

His brothers reacted to the report on Facebook yesterday.

One noted that though Mr Ferguson indicated he was experiencing engine troubles at 8.50pm, first responders did not arrive until an hour later.

Another brother noted that though investigators found Mr Ferguson could have survived for five days following the crash in the best scenario, the Royal Bahamas Defence Force restricted search because of the weather.

A third brother hit out at National Security Minister Marvin Dames who defended the search and rescue efforts following the family’s initial criticism, saying it was unbecoming of him to push back against the family’s claims absent of the facts.