MEBA2012: ARGUS CHEQ is helping to wipe out the grey
The ARGUS CHEQ charter evaluation and qualification-rating programme is attracting increasing interest in the region.
Rizon Jet recently became the first charter company in the Middle East to achieve a platinum rating and there are two more in the pipeline.Joseph Moeggenberg, president and CEO of Argus (pictured), said the rise in interest in ARGUS accreditation comes on the back of concerns about the charter “grey market”.
“Charter customers are now more interested in finding an operator that can be trusted and ARGUS CHEQ provides the standard for operator due diligence,” he said.
The scheme also validates an operator’s safety history.
“In a recent survey 80% of Fortune 500 companies said they would fly with companies that had performed a safety audit, such as the ARGUS platinum scheme, which is administered by Nexus in the MENA region. It guarantees accreditation to the IS-BAO standard in just one visit,” said Moeggenberg.
A two-person team completes the validations over a period of two days and works through an extensive list. ARGUS completes around 200 audits each year and Moeggenberg said that the most common cause of failure was a lack of a defined safety management system (SMS).
“If a company does fail because of an inadequate SMS then we complete a gap analysis to decide what needs to be done to bring the company up to scratch,” he said.
There are currently more than 400 ARGUS-rated charter operators flying more than 3,500 aircraft.
The seeds of a new working group to get rid of the illegal charter market in the region were sown at the Middle East Business Aviation Conference on Monday.
