On April 29, 2021, the National Civil Aviation Agency (“ANAC”), in promotion of another edition of the event “Segurança em Foco”, coordinated a lecture with the theme “The risks of clandestine air transport for operational safety”. The event began with a theoretical approach on the concept of clandestine air transport of passengers, popularly known as “TACA” (Clandestine Air Taxi”), brought by Resolution No. 472 of ANAC. According to the provisions of the aforementioned standard, TACA is the “passenger air transport service carried out by an individual or legal entity, in a remunerated manner, in disagreement with or without a certificate, authorization or grant, as applicable, to carry out this service”.
The TACA, besides being outside the regulations applicable to its type of operation, many times its air operators present inaccurate information and fraudulent documents about their activity; fail to faithfully comply with the operational requirements imposed by ANAC; hide hours in the logbook; perform clandestine maintenance, also known as “MACA” (“Clandestine Maintenance”), directly and evidently violating several norms applicable to the sector. It is, therefore, an invariably precarious and highly dangerous operation, since its practice directly affects one of the most important pillars of aviation, operational safety.
Under a historical perspective, it has already been proven that the TACA would be linked to several air accidents that occurred in the past, which is why ANAC is elaborating a research from the correlation between the referred damage events in order to clarify and punctuate all the risks that surround it.
Another relevant fact about TACA’s practice is that its operation directly and negatively affects the aviation market, since, although of extremely high risk, for being generally associated with values lower than those practiced by Air Taxi operators, as well as with “facilities” which, although expressly forbidden by law or regulations (such as, for example, not issuing invoices or landing at places not regulated by ANAC) are offered to the consumer, TACA establishes an unfair competition with the air operators that faithfully follow the rules and regulations imposed on the others players in the aviation market, especially to Air Taxi.
In order to make the consumer aware of the risks of the TACA practice and thus allow a “decentralized” inspection by the population, ANAC launched the digital platform “Voe Seguro” (available at https://sistemas.anac.gov.br/voeseguro/), in addition to the denunciation channel that can be accessed through the link https://www.gov.br/anac/pt-br/canais_atendimento/fale-com-a-anac. Through the referred vehicles the consumer will be able to obtain relevant and efficient information about the non-regular public air transportation in the modality of air cab and report, in an anonymous way, the practice of irregular activities, thus amplifying considerably the reach of the regulator to combat TACA.
The Aeronautical Law team at DDSA – De Luca, Derenusson, Schuttoff e Advogados will continue to monitor the main issues and keep its clients and collaborators informed.