Senate inquiry puts new pressure on air safety secrecy
May 3, 2011 – 3:57 pm, by
Ben Sandilands
There is some last minute uncertainty over whether the Senate Inquiry into pilot training and airline safety will table its report tomorrow afternoon, but one thing is clear, the committee will ask CASA why it didn’t mention its show cause action against Tiger Airways in March when it was giving testimony at its hearings.
At this stage there are two courses of action being considered by the committee members.
One course would be to report its findings as intended tomorrow afternoon, and deal with the Tiger and CASA issue in a further hearing leading to a supplementary report.
The other course would be to defer the final report until these issues have been dealt with through an additional hearing.
This story in The Age, which goes to prove it still has reporters working on what is
not a good day for Fairfax journalists, is correct.
However the crucial issue which had already raised the hackles of members of the committee, is the hard wired resistance of CASA, and the ATSB, to disclosing the nature of safety concerns to the travelling public, instead of the current policy of keeping it in the dark when safety risks are brought to their attention.
In its hearings the Senate inquiry uncovered a case of the ATSB not even talking to the pilots of a Jetstar flight that experienced a serious wind shear incident because it accepted Jetstar’s assurance it didn’t matter.
This from an airline that didn’t tell the ATSB it had illegally changed the standard operating procedures for a go-around incorporated in an approved flight manual for the A320 that nearly resulted in a crash at Melbourne Airport in 2007 until the true nature of that incident was exposed by media reports.
In the case of CASA the Senate committee members are considering requiring the safety regulator to explain exactly what Tiger Airways was doing that caused it to issue a show cause notice that could have lead to a suspension of its air operator certificate late in March.
The right of the public to know what the safety regulator is doing and why is very much a major issue in this inquiry.