The sky over the Senate goes dark with circling airline executives and angry pilots – Plane Talking
The sky over the Senate goes dark with circling airline executives and angry pilots
October 29, 2010 – 6:08 pm, by Ben Sandilands
A Senate inquiry into airline flight crew training and standards in Australia has turned into a last ditch stand by ‘the old Qantas’ culture of life time highly experienced company pilots against ‘the new’ Jetstar culture of low experience short term piloting ‘solutions’.
The Qantas Group had already completed a major and detailed rebuttal of the submission lodged by the Australian and International Pilots Association (AIPA), which is the main union for Qantas and Jetstar pilots, in time for Thursday’s original deadline for lodgement with the Rural Affairs and Transport Committee,
and that deadline has since been extended to allow for additional submissions at large.
A spokesperson for Tiger Airways said this afternoon that it would also engage with the inquiry and co-operate in every way. It remains unclear whether the Virgin Group will participate, however what is clear is that a significant discussion about pilot training, pilot experience and pilot safety issues is likely to occur during the inquiry instigated by independent SA senator, Nick Xenophon.
The AIPA document, published last night by Plane Talking, goes to the heart of its long standing claims that Qantas, through its low cost subsidiary Jetstar, is disconnecting itself from the high piloting standards of the past in the pursuit of younger inexperienced ‘generation Y’ pilots, who will bend to a cost cutting culture that has lower respect for rules or standards, and thus imperils the level of safety that travellers expect from Australian carriers.
It is a given that the Qantas submission will strongly contest AIPA’s claims, literally line by line where it sees it as necessary.
The opposed management and union submissions may well inflame the generational ‘cultural’ gap that is evident in the flying game between the expectations and commitments of younger and older pilots.
However the Qantas case will be tested by the recent US decision to outlaw the hiring of low flight time pilots with the same levels of inexperience as that which is tolerated by current Australian regulations and which forms a key part of the Jetstar and Tiger low cost business model.
If pilot inexperience is now illegal in new hirings in US airlines yet legal in Australian carriers, who is right and who is wrong? What makes a substantially simulator and theory trained pilot with 200 hours flying experience safe to fly an Australian jet, but unsafe to fly an American jet?
The pilot union argument is that hands on real world flying experience is the difference, and that the low cost route to sourcing less experienced pilots is a recipe for a disaster.
The AIPA submission, as already reported earlier in Plane Talking, is full of unpleasant disclosures for air travellers, including its pointing out that current junior pilot hirings in Australia can count time flying gliders as part of their experience, and that new style managements are instructing pilots to keep their hands off manual flying, and rely on modern automated flight systems for all but a matter of minutes in flights lasting hours.
The not so subtle sub text of the AIPA case is that ‘modern’ airline managements despise the legacy of highly experienced pilots on high pay, and have unduly outsourced the tick-the-box simulator dominated training courses for young low pay recruits to third party providers who are allegedly compromised by their commercial relationships with the carriers.
It also argues that as Australian regulations do not define the experience levels required for promotion to captain, a dangerous situation is arising where low time captains and even lower flight time first officers are being put together in the cockpit of jet airliners lacking the hands on experience to deal with unexpected situations brought about by systems failures or severe weather conditions or other abnormal circumstances.
The pilot submission concludes with its arguments in support of a private members bill, also introduced by Senator Xenophon, which would impose criminal sanctions on airlines or staff that evade their responsibilities to report safety incidents or use ‘cultural pressure’ to silence pilots concerned about safety related issues.
This goes directly to claims that latter day high cost and low cost carrier cultures encourage pilots to work around rather than to the rules, something that has in recent years lead to such bizarre incidents as a British Airways 747 flying right across the US and North Atlantic on only three engines, or a REX turbo prop flying most of the way from Wagga Wagga to Sydney on only one engine, a gamble that the ATSB not only ignored, but offered excuses for on behalf of the airline.
If the AIPA claims are correct, this is the best and last chance Australia has of reversing unsafe developments in airline piloting standards that will lead to a major disaster for an Australian airline.