Ariana is the national airline of:
a. Pakistan b. Slovenia c. Afghanistan
It’s four o'clock in the afternoon and a hundreds of employees are leaving the
headquarters of Ariana, Afghanistan's national airline. In the boardroom, one
stays behind. Dr Muhammad Atash, a man with a kind but worried face, sits in
his chair and rubs his eyes. Ariana faces a number of "difficulties," he explains
modestly. "Embezzlement. Nepotism. Red tape. Lack of qualified staff, and a
general attitude not to work." But then he pauses. "I believe we are starting to
make progress."
Ariana has few equals in the airline
business for many reasons, all of them
bad. Its history is abysmal. During Afghanistan's quarter of a century of war,
Ariana planes were shut down, shot down or hijacked. It is still nobody's
airline of choice today. A disastrous safety record means its flights are barred
from most European and American airports. It is nicknamed "Scaryana". UN
officials and foreign diplomats are forbidden to board. And most of the 1,700
staff are, Atash cheerfully admits, spectacularly incompetent or corrupt.
Is Ariana the world's worst airline? Not necessarily.
There are many poor
airlines across the developing world. "I would not single out Ariana," says
David Learmount at
Flight International
magazine. "If a country has no safety
culture, neither does its airline." But Ariana has one advantage over other
disaster airlines - a plan to turn it around. Atash, a straight-talking Afghan-
American emigre, returned three years ago
from the USA where he ran a
business. He was given the job of manager at Ariana in June.
It is not a glamorous job. Atash is paid just $100 a month and uses his own
mobile phone. But he has a can-do attitude and plan to get rid of hundreds of
deadwood staff without actually firing them. It is a difficult task but he is not
alone. Atash pushes a buzzer. In comes Hanns Marienfeld, the leader of a
six-strong team from Lufthansa hired to help with the rescue plan. He
describes the state of Ariana one year ago: "It
was not up to international
standards," he says. "The flight schedule was non-existent. Customers had to
pay a bribe to get a ticket, a second bribe to get a boarding pass and
sometimes a third to get their seat in business class. We flew here or there,
whenever the pilots felt like it." Initial safety standards were not good. In 2003
and 2004, Ariana's fleet of six planes suffered six major engine failures. "In
Germany our pilots only see that sort of thing in a flight simulator.
In Ariana
we do it in real life," says Marienfeld.
The early years were very different. Founded in 1955, Ariana quickly gained a
reputation as a small but proud regional carrier. It flew hippies and
Macmillan Publishers Ltd 2006
Taken from the Magazine section in
www.onestopenglish.com
adventurers from London, Paris and Frankfurt and brought honeymooning
couples from neighbouring Pakistan. But in 1973,
King Zahir Shah was
overthrown and five years later the guns of war exploded. The visitors
vanished and Ariana, like the rest of Afghanistan, fell into a steep decline.
During the 10-year Soviet occupation, when the roads were too dangerous,
Ariana became the safest way to travel. But the sense of security was strictly
relative. Thanks to US support, the mujahideen were armed with Stinger anti-
aircraft missiles. So Ariana pilots had to learn dangerous manoeuvres
to avoid
the missiles while taking off and landing. Some staff could take no more. On a
flight to Kandahar in 1989, a fight broke out in the cockpit. The pilot wanted to
defect to neighbouring Iran. His co-pilot resisted. As they fought for the
controls, the plane fell out of the sky, crashing into the desert near the Iranian
border. All six people on board died.
After the Soviet departure the airline went from bad to worse. When the
Taliban took control of Kabul a year later, they changed Ariana's 20th-century
business to fit their 7th-century ideals. Stewardesses were sent home, inflight
music was banned and control was handed to a 26-year-old zealot. The
helpless pilots asked the Islamic courts for permission to trim their beards
–
otherwise they could not fit the emergency oxygen masks on to their faces.
The UN imposed an international flight ban
on the airline as part of a
sanctions package against the Taliban. The company's reputation for disaster
got bigger as its fleet of ageing aircraft got smaller. The former prime minister
died in a 1997 crash; two accidents in early 1998 killed about 100 people. In
2000 a flight from Kabul to Mazar-i-Sharif was hijacked to Stansted airport in
the UK.
The US-led offensive the next year should have saved Ariana. Instead it
almost destroyed the company. US planes bombed the Ariana fleet,
demolishing six of its eight planes. The Taliban took $500,000 in company
cash and ran.
Now a process of change is taking root. The number of flights has increased
from 10 to 15 a week. Management claims 85% of flights are on time and the
first accounts in 16 years show that Ariana made a modest $1m
profit last
year. At Kabul airport the mechanics are being given new tools and new pilots
are being trained, many of them former fighters. The old Kabul office is due to
close and a modern sales centre, complete with young, eager staff and
computerised booking, will open soon.
Meanwhile Atash plans to put half his 1,700 workforce into a "reserve pool",
asking them to stay at home but continue their pay. "We
are building the
system with completely new people. We cannot afford to mix them with the
Macmillan Publishers Ltd 2006
Taken from the Magazine section in
www.onestopenglish.com
corrupt old ones," says Atash. Success is far from guaranteed and a battle is
now under way for control of the company. "We're going to fight all the way,"
Atash promises. "Because the other option is to sit here and do nothing. And
that's not an option - either for Ariana or for Afghanistan."
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