Ten fatalities in 9 weeks?

[nonsense]

Originally Posted by Sunfish

...A practical example was provided by the demise of Ansett Airlines. Its there if you ready between the lines of the special ATSB report. The owners cut too deep. They removed (fired) at least one layer of the maintenance planning staff, the guys who used to be led by Capt. Doug Kelynack, all old LAMES in grey cardigans who had encyclopedic aircraft knowledge and managed the process of assembling work packages, scheduling AD's, etc, etc. for individual aircraft. They may have also got rid of Les Hesses merry men, the maintenance schedulers. They grey men went, and with them the irreplaceable knowledge.

Nothing happened for at least three years, but progressively things weren't done that needed to be done. One day it was discovered that a critical B767 AD had been missed and Boeing wasn't granting extensions and when ATSB and CASA looked further in a special audit, NOTHING could be guaranteed about the maintenance state of the entire fleet. CASA had to pull the AOC. Ansett collapsed.

Originally Posted by Squawk7700

So Ansett failed because of an AD on a 767? Interesting.

AVIATION SAFETY INVESTIGATION BS/20010005
Investigation into Ansett Australia maintenance safety deficiencies and the control of continuing airworthiness of Class A aircraft

Page 10 of pdf, marked page ix:
Deficiencies in the Ansett engineering and maintenance organisation
The ATSB investigation found that similar deficiencies within the Ansett engineering
and maintenance organisation led to the withdrawal from service of the B767 aircraft
in December 2000 and April 2001. Those deficiencies were related to:
• organisational structure and change management
• systems for managing work processes and tasks
• resource allocation and workload.
...
The Ansett fleet was diverse and the point had been reached where some essential
aircraft support programs were largely dependent on one or two people. Hence it was
possible for an error or omission by a particular specialist to go undetected for a
number of years.
...
People and robust systems are two of the prime defences against error. Therefore, a
combination of poor systems and inadequate resources has the potential to
compromise safety. If a failure by one or two individuals can result in a failure of the
system as a whole, then the underlying problem is a deficient system, not simply
human fallibility.