Re: BA 747 Engine Fire
From Today's "The Australian";
" Cracks appear in British airline safety
Steve Creedy, Aviation writer
January 02, 2006
A STRING of midair incidents involving British Airways, one of the three European airlines servicing Australia, has raised questions about widespread safety problems at the airline.
A report by Britain's Air Accident Investigation Branch found BA jets suffered mid-air failures because of "systemic" problems with the carrier's maintenance.
After inquiries into four mid-air incidents, investigators said safety problems could be "widespread within the organisation", The Sunday Times newspaper in London revealed yesterday.
Investigators warned that shoddy work practices appeared to be accepted as the norm by some BA maintenance staff.
The newspaper listed a series of incidents, including a door that ripped off a Boeing 777 at 6000 feet.
The door gouged the plane's fuselage and narrowly missed a couple walking below when it hit the ground.
In another incident, fuel gushed out of a plane that had just taken off from Heathrow Airport, leaving a two-kilometre vapour trail, because screws and a cap that should have plugged a hole were left inside the tank.
And the pilots of a Boeing 757 were forced to put on oxygen masks and land as their cabin filled with oil fumes. It was later confirmed that engineers put too much oil in the jet.
Maintenance workers in late 2003 also forgot to properly reattach two wing panels on a Paris-bound Boeing 757 that then responded abnormally to the flight controls.
As the captain prepared to land and the autopilot was disconnected, the plane started drifting to the right, forcing the pilot to take corrective action.
And investigators said the failure to check the wing panels were installed did not appear to be an isolated incident.
"Ineffective supervision of maintenance staff had allowed working practices to develop that had compromised the level of airworthiness control and had become accepted as the norm," they said.
"Maintenance errors were not the result of wilful negligence, or any desire to perform a less-than-satisfactory job, but the result of a combination of systemic issues that had increased the probability of an error being committed."
The criticism from the AAIB is unprecedented for an airline that has claimed a reputation for having one of the best-maintained fleets in the world.
Although BA has recently relied increasingly on codeshare flights with Qantas to get its passengers to and from Australia, it still flies its own planes to Melbourne and Sydney.
A spokesman for the Civil Aviation Safety Authority said yesterday the Australian regulator was unaware of the report and was unlikely to take action.
He said CASA would leave any action to the British regulator, which it recognised as the competent authority.
A Qantas spokeswoman could not say whether the airline had work done on its aircraft by British Airways Engineering, BA's maintenance section.
However, BA told The Sunday Times it took the safety report "very seriously" and had addressed the problems in its maintenance processes.
"British Airways prides itself on safety and recognises that we are always ready to learn from incidents and encourage open transparent reporting," said the airline's head of safety, Captain Rod Young.
The airline now has only 6000 engineers, compared with 9500 in 1995, despite its fleet remaining at a similar size to 10 years ago, with 288 aircraft. "