ICAO to audit Kazakhstan airlines by autumn

The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) will audit Kazakhstan air companies in autumn, Tengrinews.kz reports citing Kazakhstan Vice-Minister of Transport and Communications Azat Bekturov. “A complex work is currently in process. We want our company to be removed from any blacklists. As we have repeated several times we are working with the ICAO and their experts. Thanks to that work, we suppose that we will bring ICAO auditors in the end of summer or in the beginning of autumn to take the airlines out of the blacklist,” Bekturov told the journalists on the sidelines of the 6th Astana Economic Forum. “We hope that this time there will be a big difference compared to 2009. We will contact the EU flights safety commission in November and let them know that the audit, I hope, has been passed successfully and the required work has been completed. We will ask the EU to vote for removing restrictions from our airlines in the European space,” he said. “This is a difficult job. This is the first time we check the aircrafts registered in Kazakhstan but based abroad. Earlier Kazakhstan companies used to work without such checks. We can now pay good salaries to hire best experts. They are experienced, possess the required certificates and licenses to check and inspect western-made aircrafts that are currently in use in Kazakhstan,” the Vice-Minister added. The European Union earlier published the list of airlines banned from flying over its territory. Almost all the Kazakhstan airlines were on the blacklist. By Baubek Konyrov