FlyerTalk Forums - View Single Post - Mexico Codeshare Prohibited by FAA - AA Policy for MX Re-Ticketing/Refunds et seq
Old Aug 1, 2010, 4:39 pm
  #6  
flatlander
 
Join Date: Dec 2009
Location: Flatland
Programs: AA Lifetime Gold 1MM, BA Gold, UA Peon
Posts: 6,095
While Mexicana may have financial troubles, that's not the official reason.
As the FAA press release says, Mexico (so by implication, the Mexican Dirección General de Aeronáutica Civil) does not meet all ICAO safety standards. Some of those standards are about being willing to regulate (neither corrupt nor lazy) and some about resources (technical skills, staffing, etc).

The way international air regulation works is that each ICAO member state has a government organisation responsible for safety regulation of the airlines that are registered in that state. So if the state's regulator is considered incompetent, all airlines in that state must be considered suspect, since there is no way to regulate them separately. That's why all Indonesian airlines were banned from the EU from 2007 to 2009, for example, even though Garuda are a pretty competent lot - there was no way for EU aviation regulators to have good certainty that anyone was checking on Garuda and a number of other airlines in Indonesia certainly were not being properly regulated.

So the FAA won't let insufficiently-competently-regulated airlines start new service, or codeshare with US carriers. Unfortunately for competent airlines in incompetently-regulated places, there's no way for the airline to prove they are doing it right if their regulator is not.

Financial stability does have a role to play in aviation safety, in that airlines with no operating cash can be tempted to choose, or be forced, not to do proper maintenance. But in this case, it's a government-to-government action which is a consequence of international aviation regulation being a government-to-government activity.
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