Topical News Lessons

Fill the gaps using these key words from the text: 
employee corrupt 
engine 
failure flight 
simulator 
bribe 
improve 
civil 
war 
sanctions 
1. If you pay a ____________, you give someone money to help you by 
doing something illegal. 
2. A ____________ is a war between different groups of people inside the 
same country. 
3. ____________ are an official order to stop trade and communication 
with a country because it has broken international law. 
4. If someone is ____________, they accept money from other people to 
do illegal things. 
5. An ____________ is someone who works for a company or an 
organisation. 
6. If a plane has ____________, its engine stops working. 
7. Pilots learn to fly in a ____________ before they start flying real 
planes. 
8. If you ____________ something, you make it better. 
Look in the text and find this information as quickly as possible: 
1. What is the capital city of Afghanistan? 
2. How many employees does Ariana have? 
3. How much pay does Dr Atash receive each month? 
4. What is the name of the German national airline? 
5. When was Ariana founded? 
6. When did the Soviet army leave Afghanistan? 
Dr Muhammad Atash is the Manager of Ariana, the national airline of 
Afghanistan. Ariana has a number of "problems", he explains. "Employees 
steal from the company. They give jobs to members of their family. A lot of our 
employees have no qualifications and many of them do not want to work. But I 
think we are starting to make progress." 
Ariana has a very bad image. Its history is terrible. During the 25 years of war 
in Afghanistan, Ariana lost many of its planes. No-one wants to fly 

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©
Macmillan Publishers Ltd 2006 
Taken from the Magazine
section in 
www.onestopenglish.com
Ariana today. Its safety record is very bad and this means Ariana planes 
cannot fly to most European and American airports. United Nations officials 
and foreign diplomats never take Ariana flights. Many of Ariana’s 1,700 staff 
are corrupt, Atash says.
Is Ariana the world's worst airline? Possibly. There are many bad airlines in 
the developing world. "Ariana is not worse than many other airlines," says 
David Learmount at 
Flight International
magazine. "If a country has no safety 
culture, its airline will have no safety culture." But Ariana is better than many 
other bad airlines in one way – it has a business plan. Atash, an Afghan-
American, returned three years ago from the USA where he had a business. 
He started work as the manager of Ariana in June.
It is not an easy job. His pay is only $100 a month and he has to use his own 
mobile phone. But he wants to change things. His assistant is Hanns 
Marienfeld, one of a team of six people from the German national airline 
Lufthansa, which are helping to improve Ariana. "When we arrived one year 
ago, Ariana 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 a seat in business class. We 
only flew when the pilots wanted to fly." Safety standards were not good. In 
2003 and 2004 Ariana's six planes had six major engine failures. "In Germany 
our pilots only see engine failures in a flight simulator. In Ariana we do it in 
real life," says Marienfeld.
Ariana was founded in 1955 as a small regional airline. It flew hippies and 
adventurers to Kabul from London, Paris and Frankfurt and brought young 
couples from Pakistan. But in 1978, a civil war began. The visitors stopped 
coming and Ariana, like the rest of Afghanistan, had terrible problems. 
In 1979, the Soviet Union occupied Afghanistan. The roads were very 
dangerous then and Ariana was the safest way to travel. But flying was still 
very dangerous. The Afghan fighters who were fighting against the Soviet 
army had American anti-aircraft missiles. Sometimes they fired their missiles 
at planes. Some pilots wanted to leave. On a flight to Kandahar in 1989 the 
pilot and the co-pilot began to fight. The pilot wanted to fly the plane to Iran. 
The co-pilot did not want to go. While they were fighting, the plane fell out of 
the sky and crashed into the desert near the Iranian border. Everyone on the 
plane died.
The Soviet army left in 1989 but the airline’s problems became even worse. 
The Taliban took control of Kabul a year later and brought their 7
th
century 
ideas to Ariana's 20th-century business. They sent the stewardesses home, 
stopped the playing of music in planes, and gave the job of director to a 26-
year-old religious fanatic.

---

©
Macmillan Publishers Ltd 2006 
Taken from the Magazine
section in 
www.onestopenglish.com
The United Nations imposed sanctions on the Taliban and this meant that 
Ariana could not fly to other countries. Its planes got older and older and its 
image became worse and worse. The former prime minister died in a 1997 
crash; two accidents in 1998 killed about 100 people.
In 2001, the US and other countries occupied Afghanistan. Many people 
thought this was a good thing for Ariana but US planes bombed Ariana’s 
planes and destroyed six of its eight planes. The Taliban stole $500,000 in 
cash from Ariana and ran away.
Now things are changing. The number of flights has increased from 10 to 15 a 
week. Ariana management says 85% of flights are on time. Ariana made a 
$1m profit last year. At Kabul airport the mechanics have new tools and the 
company is training new pilots. It is also opening a modern sales centre, with 
young, enthusiastic staff and a computerised booking system. 
Now Atash plans to ask half his 1,700 staff to stay at home but he will 
continue to pay them. "We are building the system with completely new 
people. We cannot mix them with the corrupt old employees." he says. There 
is no guarantee of success, however, and there is now a battle to control the 
company. "We're going to fight," Atash promises. "Because the only other 
possibility is to sit here and do nothing. And that's not good - either for Ariana 
or for Afghanistan."