Safety thinking - The Indonesian way.....

Indonesian airlines booming, but are they safe?

Lion Air is Indonesia's biggest domestic carrier, but the airline is still on the European Union's banned list over safety concerns.

Sometime last year, the number of people flying domestically around Indonesia officially passed the number of people flying around Australia.

And, while the Australian air travel market was moribund because of local economic conditions, Indonesia's was flying, growing at around 15 per cent a year - 60 million domestic passenger trips in 2011, compared with Australia's

54 million. The growth in international travel to and from Indonesia was even greater.

Thousands of Australians are among those taking to the skies in Indonesia (more than 900,000 according to the latest figures), either on business or as holidaymakers exploring Bali and beyond on the archipelago.

Yet, even though there are signs that the carnage of recent decades has begun to slow, it is still an extremely dangerous place to fly compared with Australia.

The government of Indonesia unwittingly contributed to the death toll in 2001 when it removed many of the bureaucratic hurdles in the way of new airlines as it encouraged economic growth to lift the island nation out of poverty.
"It's possible we concentrated more on developing the market (in 2001) and were not so focused on safety concerns," Hemi Pamuraharjo, the deputy director for scheduled flight services at the Indonesia Ministry of Transportation, told the New York Times last week.