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JAKARTA - Indonesia will announce the results of an audit on airlines this week, the country's aviation chief said today, amid pressure to improve air safety following a string of accidents in recent months.
A team set up by the government to evaluate transport safety following the disappearance of an Adam Air jet carrying 102 people in January has recommended that airlines found to have violated safety standards be closed.
Budhi Muliawan Suyitno, the director general of civil aviation at the transport ministry, said airlines would be rated and those in the unsafe category would be given time to improve before they were suspended or closed.
"There will be stages, a warning stage, suspension stage and closure stage," Suyitno told Reuters.
He did not say how much time airlines would be given to improve standards.
Officials are discussing details of the new measures and will announce the results of the recent airline audit this week, he said.
On March 7, a Garuda Indonesia plane with 140 people on board overshot the runway in cultural capital Yogyakarta and burst into flames, killing 21 people including five Australians.
Investigators said the plane came in too fast to land but they still do not know why.
Air travel in Indonesia, a country of more than 17,000 islands, has grown substantially since the liberalisation of the airline industry in 1999 that has triggered price wars among airlines.
The rapid growth has raised questions over whether safety has been compromised and if the infrastructure and personnel can cope with the huge increase.
Indonesia is also grappling with problems in other modes of transportation.
There have been two serious ferry disasters in recent months killing hundreds of people, while rail accidents on an ageing system built during the Dutch colonial era occur frequently.
- REUTERS
