Foscari - Dipartimento di Scienze Ambientali, Informatica e Statistica

2. An ____________ is a person who leaves their country in order to live somewhere else.
3. A ____________ is money offered to an official to help you by doing something illegal or dishonest.
4. If you ____________ a plane, you take control of it using force.
5. ____________ are official orders to stop trade with a country that has broken international law.
6. ____________ is a complicated system of rules and processes.
7. If something is ____________ , it causes a lot of damage or harm.
8. An ____________ person does not have the ability to do a job correctly.
9. A ____________ person does dishonest or illegal things to earn money.
10. A ____________ is an informal name that is not a real name.
Look in the text and find this information as quickly as possible:
1. What is the name of Afghanistan’s national airline?
2. How many employees does Ariana have?
3. How much money does the manager of Ariana earn each month?
4. When was Ariana founded?
5. When did the US invade Afghanistan?
6. How many flights does Ariana now operate each week?
It’s four o'clock in the afternoon and a hundreds of employees are leaving the headquarters of Ariana,
Afghanistan's national airline. In the boardroom, one man stays behind. Dr Muhammad Atash, a man
with a kind but worried face, sits in his chair and rubs his eyes. Ariana faces a number of "difficulties",
he explains. "Employees steal from the company. They give jobs to members of their family. There’s a
lot of bureaucracy. There aren’t many qualified staff and a lot of people prefer not to do any work." But
then he pauses. "I believe we are starting to make progress."
Ariana is different from most other airlines for many reasons, all of them bad. Its history is terrible.
During Afghanistan's quarter of a century of war, Ariana planes were shut down, shot down or
hijacked. No-one chooses to fly Ariana today. It has a disastrous safety record and this means it cannot
fly to most European and American airports. It is nicknamed "Scaryana". UN officials and foreign
diplomats are not allowed to take Ariana flights. And most of the 1,700 staff are, according to Atash,
either extremely incompetent or corrupt.
Is Ariana the world's worst airline? Perhaps not. There are many bad airlines in the developing world.
"Ariana is no worse than many others," says David Learmount at Flight International magazine. "If a
country has no safety culture, neither does its airline." But Ariana has one advantage over other disaster
airlines – it has a rescue plan. Atash, a straight-talking Afghan-American emigre, returned three years
ago from the USA where he ran a business. He was given the job of manager at Ariana in June.
It is not a glamorous job. Atash is paid just $100 a month and uses his own mobile phone. But he has a
can-do attitude and plans to get rid of hundreds of incompetent staff. It is a difficult task but he is not
alone. In comes Hanns Marienfeld, the leader of a six-strong team from Lufthansa hired to help with
the rescue plan. He describes the state of Ariana one year ago: "It was not up to international
standards," he says. "It had no flight schedule. 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, whenever the pilots felt like it." Initial safety standards were not good. In 2003 and 2004,
Ariana's fleet of six planes 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," says Marienfeld.
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