http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2...23/2283393.htm
Above reported widely on ABC news this morning
Yogyakarta airport unlicensed at time of crash: report
Posted Mon Jun 23, 2008 7:44pm AEST
Updated Mon Jun 23, 2008 9:53pm AEST
Five Australians died when the Boeing 737 bounced and skidded off the runway. (Reuters: Pentak Lanud Adisucipto)
Indonesia's Yogyakarta airport was operating without a licence due to outstanding safety issues when a Garuda plane crashed last year, killing 21 people, an Australian air safety firm has found.
Flight Safety Pty Ltd, which carried out an audit of the airport following a request from an unnamed client, said authorities had failed to implement five conditions for a licence, including extending the runway and safety area.
State carrier Garuda's Boeing 737, with 140 people on board, bounced and skidded off the runway in Yogyakarta, central Java, before bursting into flames in a rice field in March 2007.
Five Australians were killed in the crash.
The aviation safety firm said Yogyakarta's operating licence had ended on August 1, 2006 - eight months before the crash - because it had failed to fulfil the five conditions for the five-year licence issued by Indonesian authorities.
An Indonesian safety official denied the airport was functioning without a licence.
"At that time [the licence] was still valid, but the RESA [Runway End Safety Area] was not long enough," Mardjono Siswo Suwarno of the National Transport Safety Committee said.
"But still in the [Garuda] case, even if the RESA length was adequate, the plane would have still overrun because the speed was 1.8 times normal speed."
Last year, an Indonesian safety report said the pilot ignored 15 warnings as he descended too fast, but declined to attribute the crash to "human error" or "pilot error".
The final report into the crash concluded that airport deficiencies were not responsible for the accident, although investigators concede that an adequate safety run-off area and adequate safety equipment may have reduced the human cost.
Most alarmingly however, more than a year after the crash, Yogyakarta's runway end safety area still has not been extended as required and the correct safety equipment has not been supplied.
In February this year, the pilot was arrested on charges that include manslaughter and violating aviation laws.
Brisbane-based Flight Safety owner Colin Weir also accuses the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) and Indonesian authorities of being compromised because they are keeping quiet about the issue.
He says the ATSB was not aware that Yogyakarta airport was unlicensed at the time of the Garuda crash, but the ATSB says not complying with Annexe 14 amounts to the same thing.
"If there is another overrun on that airport, the same thing is going to happen. It is an absolutely untenable thing in terms of safety," he said.
"The issue here is the fact that the licence itself was null and void, now that has implications for the accident and the victims of the accident.
"They would need to know - and I think from a closure point of view - it's only fair to give everybody the opportunity to get all the information that's sitting in the background.
"In this case, because the airport's licence was in fact not current, there could be legal and insurance implications that they would want to pursue."
Airport audit
Flight Safety said it was called on by a client to audit Garuda after the crash, which led it to audit Yogyakarta, Solo and Semarang airports. It found that all three airports at the time were operating without a licence.
"When we looked at these airports we discovered that the licensing, the Airport Operating Certificate, had been issued for five years but subject to five conditions and these conditions had to be fulfilled within a 12-month period," Mr Weir said.
"The conditions included extension of the runway and safety area and that there be an audit by the DGCA [Indonesian Regulatory Authority] after six months, with a final cross check audit after 12 months.
"None of this was done in the 12-month period and that period lapsed on the August 1, 2006. When the Garuda accident happened these conditions had not been fulfilled and therefore the licence becomes null and void."
Mr Weir said Flight Safety notified the ICAO, the ATSB which helped investigate the Yogyakarta crash, and the director of Indonesia's Aviation Safety body.
"We were then told by the Indonesian director of Aviation Safety that the deficiencies had been rectified, however we have just conducted a re-audit only to find that there is no change to Solo and Yogyakarta," he said, adding that he has since been told by the director that "all conditions had been fulfilled".
"They might have changed those conditions now to make it legal, but at the time of the accident we have the audit report to show that what we are saying is 100 per cent correct."
'Old issues'
The Australian Financial Review's Indonesia correspondent, Morgan Mellish, was one of the Australians killed in the crash.
Caroline Mellish is his sister and she says she has accepted a payout from Garuda and signed an agreement preventing her from taking further legal action.
"It angers me to the point where it's obvious that the issues in regards to the runway in particular were not known previously, and they had a set time-frame to rectify them," she said.
"These weren't new issues at all, as in fact we thought they might be, they were old issues that were already known and not fixed.
"So it was even more so a preventable accident, which is makes me angry and sad."
'No problems'
Budi Mulyawan Suyitno, director general of air transportation at Indonesia's transportation ministry, has told ABC radio's PM program that directions had been given but local authorities did not have the budget to implement the recommendations.
But he also said there did not appear to be a problem with Yogyakarta's licence.
"We don't see there's any licence problem [for Yogyakarta], but I will check again," he said, adding that authorities had been responding to safety concerns by declaring a RESA for 140 metres of the 2,250 metre runway and adding fire trucks.
Rapid growth in air travel in Indonesia has raised questions over whether safety has been compromised and whether the infrastructure and personnel can cope with the huge increase.
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ABC/Reuters