英语四级阅读理解精选练习：如何查看国际航班安全

>>2019英语四级模拟试题：英语四级阅读理解精选练习：如何查看国际航班安全

>>大学英语四级经典课程

You can check fares, fees and flight schedules for just about any airline in the world with a few keystrokes or a single phone call. But checking the safety of an international airline is a much more complicated task.

European and US regulators evaluate aviation safety, and the airline industry itself has a world-wide safety-audit program, but it's difficult for travelers to check airline safety when buying tickets. There's no restaurant-inspector's score posted on the airplane door or government crash-test star rating printed on your ticket.

That's unfortunate, since interest in airline safety is high. It's been a bad year for aviation fatalities, with more than 700 people killed in 16 crashes around the world so far in 2009. Many involved little-known airlines---some already on watch lists for safety concerns.

"There's no perfect solution at the moment, but it's undoubtedly getting better," said Geoff Want, principal adviser on airline safety at Rio Tinto Group, a global mining company that has its own list of carriers approved for employee travel.

Government regulators in Europe and the US take different approaches to aviation safety.

The European Union evaluates airlines and their planes and publishes a "blacklist" of unacceptable carriers, most recently updated just two weeks ago. The EU blacklist is available on the Internet at ec.europa.eu/transport/(click on "Air," then "List of airlines banned within the EU")

Be prepared, it's long and complex: 233 airlines are completely banned, and eight are allowed to operate under restrictions and conditions. Though its focus started as an airline-by-airline evaluation, the EU has moved more toward building the blacklist on evaluations of entire countries -all airlines from 15 countries have a blanket ban from the EU and are among the 233 cited.

The US Federal Aviation Administration evaluates countries, not carriers. US inspectors decide if a country's aviation infrastructure is up to snuff by counting the number of inspectors watching over airlines, assessing air-traffic-control procedures and evaluating funding and legal authority of aviation regulators. The FAA evaluation is based largely on standards set by the International Civil Aviation Organization, a United Nations-chartered group. (US airlines are required to meet or exceed international safety standards.)

The FAA says 101 countries have been assessed; 79 have Category 1 status, meaning the US believes the country meets international standards, and 22 fall into Category 2. Category 2 doesn't mean airlines from that country are banned, only that any new service and airline passenger-sharing ties are frozen. That can have economic impact on a country and its airlines, and the threat of a Category 2 downgrade can prompt improvement.

An FAA spokeswoman says its International Aviation Safety Assessments list, available atwww.faa.gov/about/initiatives/iasa. is "one tool a consumer can use to decide on air travel."

There's surprisingly little overlap between the FAA and EU lists. Airlines from Angola, Benin, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz Republic, Liberia, Gabon, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Rwanda and Zambia are banned on the EU blacklist, but those countries aren't evaluated at all by the FAA. B0th EU and US regulators share concerns on Congo, Indonesia and Swaziland. The FAA rates Zimbabwe, Israel, the Philippines, Serbia and Montenegro plus several Latin American and Caribbean nations, including Belize, Haiti, Honduras and Nicaragua, in Category 2, but not the EU.

The airline industry has come up with its own list of sorts, and it can be useful to travelers. The International Air Transport Association (IATA), the industry's world-wide trade group, began working on a standard auditing regimen nine years ago, and it has evolved into an extensive safety check now required of all airlines to be a member of IATA. Passing the audit became mandatory for membership earlier this year; 21 airlines didn't and were removed.

IATA says 330 airlines around the world have passed its audit. Of those, 230 are IATA members-another 100 airlines wanted to be certified even if not IATA members. US and EU regulators accept IOSA certification to meet requirements that airlines funneling passengers to each other through code-sharing agreements audit each other for safety issues. And a few countries -Egypt is one -require IOSA certifìcation for any airline flying there. The list is available atwww.iata.org/iosa.

如果你想查看世界上任何航空公司的票价、收费以及航班安排，只需点击几下鼠标或者打个电话就行。但是，如果你想知道某个国际航空公司的安全系数，那可要复杂得多。

欧洲和美国的监管机构都会评估航空公司的安全性，航空业本身也有一套全球安全审查系统，但是，旅客在购买机票的时候很难了解到航空公司的安全性。机舱门口可没有贴着类似餐馆检验机构评分的东西，旅客的机票上也没有印着政府失事概率测试的星级评级。

这是一个很不幸的事实，因为大众对航空公司安全性的关注度非常高。2009年是航空灾难记录非常糟糕的一年，全球共发生飞机失事事故16起，超过700人死亡。许多事故都与名不见经传的航空公司有关，其中一些因其安全顾虑已经被列入观察名单。

矿业公司力拓集团负责航空安全的主管顾问杰夫·华恩特表示，目前还没有完美的解决办法，但是情况无疑正在好转。力拓集团有一份航空公司名单，员工旅行只选择这个名单上航空公司的航班。

欧洲和美国的政府监管部门对航空安全则采取了不同的方式。

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