Economic impacts

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 511.

The implementation of the ICAO Language Proficiency Requirements comes at a cost to the aviation industry as a whole, both in direct and indirect expenses, which has been roughly estimated to be at least in hundreds of millions of dollars.

In addition to the expense of procuring and administering generally sophisticated and secure purpose-built tests for hundreds of thousands of pilots and controllers on a recurrent basis, there is the considerable cost of taking highly-paid professionals working on rosters or shifts off the job in order to sit the test and then possibly follow extensive remedial training if they fail it.

Any failure to pass the test will in turn result in the employee being withdrawn from international operations, or being subject to conditional contingency measures until 2011 (e.g. working necessarily with a colleague whose licence has been endorsed), in a work market where there is already a severe shortage of qualified professionals and financial pressures due to rising fuel costs. The Language Proficiency Requirements are definitely not good news for Human Resource departments.

At a higher level, in a global economy with an intensely competitive market where travellers select the airline they use on line, any negative publicity about the language proficiency of a given airline's staff or a country's controllers has the potential to have a very detrimental effect upon their image in the eyes of the travelling public and hence have a direct impact on ticket sales. A time is dawning when language proficiency is entering people's awareness as one of the parameters to be taken into account in air travel along with safety records, fares, punctuality, quality of service, ease of connections, leg room, baggage handling and on-board meals.