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FL: For me it provides us with an excellent opportunity to consider both the incredible foundation of international civil aviation standardization which ICAO has been able to help states achieve over the last seven and a half decades, so that international civil aviation may be developed in a safe and orderly manner, and that international air transport service may be established on the basis of equality of opportunity and operated soundly and economically, while at the same time appreciating its value as we look ahead today to a very exciting future for flight and to the many new technologies and challenges that the future doubling of air traffic volume poses. I think that the success of the Chicago Convention and of ICAO can be primarily attributed to the selection of responsibilities assigned to the organization and the flexibility that was written into the convention. For example, our auditing functions for safety and security oversight were in many ways a logical extension, albeit a significant one, of the information-gathering functions ICAO was already performing, and were complementary to the type of coordination problems ICAO was originally designed to solve. [Extracted from the article]