Is Afghanistan’s Ariana the world’s worst airline?

LONDON: Four o’clock in the afternoon and a human deluge pours from the shrapnel-scarred headquarters of Ariana, Afghanistan’s national airline. Hundreds of employees thunder down the echoing corridors — the men loosening ties, the women tugging burkas over their heads — and out of the front door. In the boardroom, one stays behind. Dr Muhammad Atash, a man with a kindly but worry-lined face, sinks into his chair and rubs his eyes. Ariana faces a number of “difficulties”, he explains modestly, counting them out on his fingers. “Embezzlement. Nepotism. Red tape. Lack of qualified staff.” He tugs on a thumb. “And a general attitude not to work.” But then he pauses, allowing his lips to crack into a thin smile. “I believe we are starting to make progress.”

Ariana has few peers in the airline business for many reasons. All of them are bad. Its history is abysmal. During Afghanistan’s quarter century of war Ariana planes were shut down, shot down or hijacked. Flights plunged into snowy mountains or vanished into remote deserts. Still, today, it is nobody’s airline of choice. A disastrous safety record means Ariana flights are barred from most European and American airports. Nicknamed, only half-jokingly, “Scaryana”, UN officials and foreign diplomats are forbidden to board. And most of the 1,700 staff are, as Atash cheerfully admits, spectacularly incompetent or corrupt. For them “inshallah” is more than a religious invocation — it is a corporate creed.

Last spring I went to the Ariana office in Wazir Akbar Khan, an upmarket Kabul neighbourhood of fortified western embassies and gaudy mansions funded with drug money. The sales centre is in a gloomy converted house across the street from a restaurant owned by a warlord who has just been elected to parliament. Behind the counter, six ticket agents were deep in conversation, apparently oblivious to the silent line of waiting customers. My query about flights to Islamabad triggered a concentrated burst of activity. A dog-eared schedule was consulted. A phone call was made. A debate in Dari erupted between two of the clerks. After several minutes it occurred that they might have forgotten me and turned to an entirely different subject. But then a man with a bushy moustache swivelled on his chair. “The flight will leave tomorrow, inshallah,” he declared.

He directed me to a second clerk who filled out the ticket and pointed me to a third who took my passport details. The fourth was the cashier, a glum man in a shabby suit, whose office was in the kitchen. He sat at a cramped table between the fridge and the cooker. “American dollars only,” he demanded, barely glancing up. At the airport the next morning I didn’t make it past the x-ray machine. “Ariana?” said the security guard with a desultory glance at my handwritten ticket. “No flight today. Cancelled. Try again tomorrow — inshallah.”

Is Ariana the world’s worst airline? Not necessarily. Calamity-prone carriers are scattered across the developing world, from the former Soviet republics to West Africa. Anyway, the question itself may be unfair. “I would not single out Ariana,” says David Learmount, safety editor at Flight International magazine. “If a country has no safety culture, neither does its airline. Look at various other countries where you have instability, recent war, a lack of democracy and a shaky economy, and you’ll find the airline is just the same.”

But Ariana has one major distinction over other disaster airlines — a plan to turn it around. Atash, a straight talking Afghan-American emigre, returned three years ago from Maryland, where he ran a string of garages. Eager to help rebuild the shattered economy, he was handed the reins at Ariana in June. “I am here to get things started and bring some sanity into the process,” he says.

It is no glamour job. Atash is paid a pitiful $100 (£56) a month and uses his own mobile phone. But he brings a can-do attitude and a war chest of fresh ideas — new computers, new planes and a Houdini-like plan to purge the company of hundreds of deadwood staff without actually firing them. The odds are stacked against him. Finances are fragile, the Fawlty Towers service ethic could take years to flush out, and malevolent political forces are looming in the background. But the crusading manager is not alone. Atash pushes a buzzer, and in strides Hanns Marienfeld. A towering man in a tweed blazer and sensible glasses, Marienfeld is the leader of a six-strong team from Lufthansa hired to help with the corporate heart surgery. He has an air of immense calm and efficiency. When he describes the state of Ariana one year ago, he presses his outstretched fingers together with the composure of a cancer surgeon bearing bad news. “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, occasionally or on demand, whenever the pilots felt like it.”

A tremor of horror creeps into his voice when he recalls the initial safety standards. Between 2003 and 2004 Ariana’s fleet of six airplanes 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,” he says. Safety standards are still not perfect, he admits, but are “getting there”. Still, he admits, if this had been Europe his advice to the shareholders — the Afghan government — would have been simple: shut it down. “But this is Afghanistan,” he says.

“We are legal and we are exceeding the minimum requirements laid down by the locals.” The early years were very different. Founded in 1955, Ariana quickly carved out a reputation as a small but proud regional carrier. The US giant Pan-American airlines took a 49% stake and sent expertise and managers from the US. The airline flew hippies and adventurers from London, Paris and Frankfurt; and brought honeymooning couples from Pakistan. The tourists wanted to sample Kabul’s liberal charms, plentiful hashish and plunge into the dozy exoticism of a peaceful land on the ancient Silk Route. Some Afghan women even wore mini skirts, an unthinkable idea today. But in 1973, King Zahir Shah was toppled and five years later the guns of war exploded. The visitors evaporated and Ariana, like the rest of Afghanistan, plunged into a steep nosedive.

Ariana became the safest way to travel during the 10-year Soviet occupation when the roads were a perilous gamble. The Mujahideen laid ambushes on all major routes between cities, so flights became crowded and the aisles began to fill with everything from coffins to chickens. But the sense of security was strictly relative. Thanks to US support the Mujahideen were also armed with formidable Stinger anti-aircraft missiles. So Ariana pilots had to learn the “corkscrew”. On approach to Kabul, planes would cruise at a safe height, avoiding the jagged peaks around the city. Suddenly they dived towards the ground in a stomach-churning spiral, hoping to shake off any Stingers, before levelling off at the last minute for a bone-jarring 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 Iran; his co-pilot resisted. As they wrestled for the controls, the plane tumbled from the sky, smashing into the desert near the Iranian border. All six people on board died. The airline fell from ignominy to infamy after the Soviet departure. As civil war exploded, rival Mujahideen factions camped inside the Ariana offices at Kabul airport, burning the aircraft maintenance records in cooking fires. In November 1995, a little-known student militia called the Taliban hijacked a cargo plane bound for Kandahar. When they seized control of Kabul a year later, the black-bearded fighters warped Ariana’s 20th-century business around their seventh century ideals. Stewardesses were sent home, in flight music was banned and control was handed to a 26-year-old zealot. The helpless pilots petitioned the Islamic courts for permission to trim their beards — otherwise, they pleaded, they could not fit the emergency oxygen masks on to their faces.

The UN slapped an international flight ban on Ariana as part of a sanctions package against the Taliban. The company’s reputation for disaster swelled larger as its fleet of ageing aircraft got smaller. Former prime minister Abdul Rahim Ghaforzai died in a 1997 crash outside Bamiyan; two accidents in early 1998 killed about 100 people. In one, a Boeing 727 smashed into a mountainside near Kabul; in the other a plane bound for Kandahar crashed near the Quetta. Apparently the pilot got lost. The drama moved to British soil in 2000. A flight from Kabul to Mazar-i-Sharif was commandeered by a gang of hijackers. After a 24-hour journey across the former Soviet Union, stopping at Tashkent and Moscow, the Boeing eventually touched down at Stansted airport. The hostage crisis was resolved four days later when the hijackers walked free — and immediately demanded asylum. “I saw England was the mother of democracy,” Ali Safi told an Old Bailey jury.

The US-led offensive the following year should have saved Ariana. Instead it almost obliterated the company. As the Taliban tottered, US bombers blitzed the fleet, demolishing six of its eight planes. Only an Antonov and a Boeing that a couple of enterprising pilots had hidden at Shindand, a remote air base near the Iranian border, survived. Meanwhile the Taliban pocketed $500,000 in company cash and ran. The US has never offered any compensation. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service