Virgin Atlantic A340-600 fuel incident
Quote
----------------------------------
nojh
Long Haul is not safe
“Excessive fatigue on long haul is a potential killer and is continually ignored by the airline bosses the CAA and the greedy accountants and shareholders.”
….
“… waffle which was never been put into practise by our World Leading reglatory body at the Belgrano.”
---------------------------------------
There has been a deliberate policy of government to reduce health and safety regulations in the workplace ie to deregulate it. There are now over 12,000 deaths of workers in the UK per annum. If Al Quaeda had killed so many UK citizens our government would be up in arms. As it is, it is the regulatory bodies that accomplish this devastation in hand with bosses, the regulators and the greedy accountants and shareholders. How many ‘in service ‘ pilot deaths there are is not on record. For the general worker population of the UK this could be likened to a civil war.
A Report has been sent to CAA regarding the premature death of a pilot (and BALPA member). The CAA are currently ignoring it.
This is in accordance with comments made after the Mt. Erebus crash by Justice Mahon who said that he thought that he had been forced to listen to “a litany of lies” by the airline and investigatory authorities.
The Mount Erebus disaster in 1979 supplied new thinking on how correct investigations could lead to higher standards of safety. The general statement given to the press following most disasters gave ‘pilot error’ as the cause.
The Chief Inspector of Air Accidents had left no room for manoeuvre. His verdict was pilot error. However, evidence pointed to a computer error programmed into the system. (A mistake that continues to be made. ) However, the Chief Inspector, who had no expertise in the piloting or navigation of sophisticated jet airlines, relied on verbal hearsay. He kept his own view that the “probable cause” was due to flying in cloud, and pilot error. The airline received virtually no criticism.
A Commission was set up to assuage public uneasiness and the rising anger felt by the airline pilots investigating team and next-of-kin of the crew members. The Inquiry under the auspices of Justice Mahon, and assisted by barristers, David Baragwanath and Gary Harrison, was meant to ‘rubberstamp’ this view. This case changed that. They found the ‘probable cause’ theory untenable.
Finally, the Mahon Report put the blame squarely on the airline.
Justice Mahon ordered the airline to pay $150,000 as a contribution to the public cost of the inquiry. The company had failed to ‘put all its cards on the table’, he said. It had denied every allegation of fault and had counter-attacked by ascribing total culpability to the crew, against whom it made the untenable allegations that there were no less than 13 separate varieties of pilot error.
Justice Mahon went on to say (in a video) that, “in this case the palpably false sections of evidence which I heard could not be the result of mistake, or faulty recollection. They originated, I am compelled to say, in a pre-determined plan of deception. They were clearly part of an attempt to conceal a series of disastrous administrative blunders and so, in regard to particular items of evidence to which I have referred, I am forced reluctantly to say that I had to listen to an orchestrated litany of lies.”
Finally, Justice Mahon said,
“That type of situation always make an enquiry complex where some disaster or scandal involving some Government agency and the procedure adopted by some Governments, the United Kingdom in particular, is to set up such an enquiry, then wait to see what the findings are. If the findings are in favour of the government it warmly supports the report, if on the other hand the findings implicate some government agency then the tendency is for the government of the day to reject the report and they will say that it is wrong. This does not happen in Australia of course, but in England and New Zealand, such an approach is in accordance with the hallowed traditions of the Westminster style of government.”
The Government has continued this tradition; worse BALPA have remained surpringly quiet about the early death of one of its members – what an opportunity lost! We, like our New Zealand cousins, are no longer surprised that the CAA ignores reports, but that a union follows suit is inexplicable. So I invite BALPA to respond - how many pilot deaths in service are there per annum? Who’s counting? Transparent, researchable answers please.