The fact that planes could not land at the Johan Adolf Pengel airport on Saturday due to the lack of air traffic controllers had to happen at some point. Successive governments have not taken the problems seriously for years and have mainly tried to solve them with empty promises. Internationally, Suriname is once again making a huge mistake, while the local aviation sector is already terminal.
Text Armand Snijders
Image CDS
For years, successive responsible ministers have turned their noses up at all the cries for help from air traffic controllers. In recent years there has been a constant complaint about the shortage of staff.
“It seems as if they are doing everything they can in Suriname to make it impossible for travelers to come”
Passenger Mildred
The reality on the work floor is staggering: where international standards prescribe eighty operational air traffic controllers, Suriname currently operates with only twenty professionals. So the complaints are certainly not unfounded. This should have been resolved a long time ago, also to guarantee safety at Surinamese airports and airspace.
International mud figure
But Surinamese administrators and policy makers are apparently not interested in the safety situation and that our country once again made a poor figure internationally on Saturday. The forced diversion of the KLM flight from Amsterdam to Port of Spain on Trinidad and Tobago made international headlines – especially in the Netherlands. But the cancellation of other regional flights or the rescheduling of entire flight schedules also had serious consequences for airlines and their passengers.
KLM cannot be blamed for this. The action by the air traffic controllers had been announced, but the control tower would be occupied again during the afternoon. For this reason, flight KL713 departed from Schiphol on Saturday morning (Dutch time). Halfway through the flight it was announced that the air traffic controllers would remain ‘sick’ until the evening hours, after which the crew decided to fly to Trinidad and Tobago.
Sleeping dogs
Responsible Minister Raymond Landveld of Transport, Communications and Tourism said last week that no claims had been received so far due to the many times that Suriname was inaccessible. After all, planes had to divert to other countries at that time due to reports of illness from air traffic controllers. He took into account that the claims could still come, but did not want to “wake sleeping dogs”.
After the weekend, all sleeping dogs will have been woken up and Landveld can expect expensive bills. KLM will undoubtedly recover the many additional costs incurred by the Surinamese shooter from the aviation authorities.
The crew allegedly exceeded the permitted number of flying hours, which meant that the aircraft had to be grounded overnight in Trinidad and Tobago. As a result, all passengers had to be accommodated in hotels in Port of Spain and could only fly to Suriname the next day. The return flight to Amsterdam planned for Saturday afternoon was therefore also delayed by a day and could only depart the next day.
Grumpy among passengers
That led to a lot of grumpiness among the passengers. “Very annoying,” said Mildred, who returned to Suriname after ten years to visit her family. “I deliberately did not book an SLM because of the problems you can expect there, so I had to pay quite a bit extra for this KLM ticket. And then you get this!” she counters indignantly the True Time. “It seems as if they are doing everything they can in Suriname to make it impossible for travelers to come. Fortunately, we flew with KLM and were therefore well received in Trinidad. That would have been absolutely different with the SLM,” she sneers.
Suriname will probably not even be able to pay impending claims, which will ultimately lead to lawsuits and even more damage to the already damaged image. The question that President Jennifer Geerlings-Simons must ask herself is whether Landveld is the right person to tackle all the problems within the aviation sector. So far it has become apparent that he is apparently unable to handle the work.
Safety at stake
Due to the failure of successive governments, safety cannot only be guaranteed at the airport, but this leads to risks throughout the Surinamese airspace. Surinamese airlines have been banned from flying to the European Union for a year now because the country has been blacklisted due to other safety issues.
Thanks to Geerlings-Simons, the air traffic controllers have returned to work. But as long as the problems are not structurally addressed, it is expected that we will have to wait for the next incident. It is not without reason that the recent problems are only a symptom of a chronic disease within the Surinamese aviation sector, which has now reached the terminal stage.
