MINSK, 29 June (BelTA) – Director of the Aviation Department of the Belarusian Transport and Communications Ministry Artyom Sikorsky took part in a videoconference session of the Council of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) on 28 June. The session focused on an intermediate report on the incident that happened to Ryanair's flight FR4978 in Belarus' air space on 23 May, representatives of the Aviation Department of the Belarusian Transport and Communications Ministry told BelTA.
During the videoconference session Artyom Sikorsky said: “In order to supervise aviation, one needs to be a highly professional and competent specialist, who clearly understands responsibility for action or inaction that influences flight safety and aviation security. I deem it my duty to explain that the financial stability of the aviation system is mutually dependent on and mutually related to security. The European Union's decisions to enforce illegal sanctions create problems, including financial ones, not only for Belarusian air carriers but for a number of other countries. Aviation should not be involved in politics. The Belarusian aviation industry employs people with various passports. We don't segregate people depending on their nationality, sort, color of skin and we don't measure the size of their skulls! Tell me whether we could have acted differently upon receiving information about the threat of an act of illegal interference. If we had not acted on these two letters with threats, the entire international community could have been completely justified in accusing us of criminal inaction! Let's not forget that you and I travel by air as passengers sometimes and would like flight safety and security enforced in the air and on the ground! Despite the sanctions Belarus and, first of all, aviators, every aviation specialist will ensure flight safety and aviation security by doing our own jobs!”
The director of the Aviation Department also said during the session that Belarus occupies a transparent stance in the course of the investigation and had provided ICAO with a massive amount of information and continues sending materials.
Artyom Sikorsky went on saying: “We tightly cooperate with the ICAO's investigation team in order to ascertain objective circumstances of what happened. We believe that if ICAO published decrypted data from onboard recorders of the Ryanair aircraft, all the false arguments about the unjustified actions of Belarus would be invalidated. We don't understand why ICAO has not pointed out yet that countries of the European Union, Canada, Ukraine, and a number of other countries have violated the Chicago Convention by introducing discriminatory sanctions against Belarus' civil aviation.”
As a result of the session the ICAO Council decided to continue the investigation in order to ascertain the facts. A report will be presented on 13 September.
