Give truth, and air safety, a chance
Yeah good catch Frank and it brings to bear that..."the more things change the more they stay the same"...or as one wiseman said:
GB Shaw: If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.
Since this in the Senate inquiry thread and "K" is basically making a plea for sanity to prevail in the chookhouse, it might be time to reflect on this article from Sandilands, as it is now relegated to the archives of obscurity..
"In a society where spin and media manipulation perpetuates myths about airline safety and keeps a lid on disclosures of unsafe practices the commitment of independent politician Nick Xenophon to his proposed Senate Inquiry into pilot training standards might trigger some long overdue reforms.
As Senator Xenophon pointed out in his address to the Australian and International Pilots Association recently, Australia is tolerating what the US now finds intolerable, which is the placing of pilots with as little as 200 hours experience in the right hand or first officer seat of airliners.
It is a madness that needs to be hauled up sharp in this country. It requires a revaluation of piloting skills and safety cultures. There are a number of elements to this controversy. One of them is the corruption of airline safety ‘cultures’ into ones where pilots increasingly think like accountants or shareholders rather than professional pilots required to conform to some very serious rules about what defines safe flight, including loss of control and upset situations, fuel and weather considerations and separation in uncontrolled air space.
Another is the popular insistence by airlines, here and elsewhere, on the notion that meeting the requirements of airworthiness directives, or maintenance intervals, or tick-the-boxes flying courses for flying skills delivered by outside trainers, all represent world’s best practice.
This is a popular lie. All the carriers are doing is meeting the minimum legal standards, or even delegating the achievement of those standards to external enterprises they have no control over. The standards required in these cases are not the highest available, they are the cheapest legally available standards, and in the case of regulatory matters like airworthiness directives, they are often the end result of ‘consultations’ between the carriers, the regulators and equipment manufacturers which involve the commercial consequences for airlines.
Airbus has been vocal on the topic diminishing flying skills, yet has been firmly challenged by the French accident investigators over its history in handling piloting issues where unreliable airspeed warnings are generated by ice clogging external air speed probes. Boeing infamously dragged the chain over 737 rudder control failures that confronted pilots with a bewildering and potentially disastrous problem for years, indeed, it even slandered the pilots who died in struggling to save several stricken jets before the truth about a lethal design error finally came out.
But back to a tighter focus. Xenophon has gone for pilot training standards in this country, which are in crisis, and for inadequate incident reporting procedures.
There is more than enough in both to keep a Senate Inquiry very usefully occupied.
Xenophon has called for Alan Joyce, as then CEO of Jetstar, to explain himself over the July 2007 botched missed approach to Melbourne of an A320. Was Joyce ignorant of his obligations to the law, or did he chose to ignore them? In this incident the airline he was responsible for broke the law on the reporting of safety incidents, and only disclosed the true situation when the ATSB felt compelled to act on a media report by myself, one and half months later. After which the ATSB produced a damning report, yet failed to refer Jetstar to the Commonwealth public prosecutor.
The ATSB is a world class technical investigator that is too timid to refer breaches of the law on failures to report serious operational incidents involving major carriers. Most recently, it sat on its hands while Tiger Airways chose to ignore its legal obligations concerning an aileron failure in one of its A320s because Tiger had decided the Australian laws didn’t matter.
It has a habit of making excuses for the airlines, although not in the case of the Lockhart River disaster in 2005, in which it nailed CASA for lack of appropriate action against a carrier it knew was dangerous.
Which raises an important issue for the Senate to consider. When the safety regulator CASA finds evidence that an operator is unsafe, does it not have an obligation to tell the travelling public, rather than do nothing to warn them, allowing an unsafe operation to continue flying in that particular case until it killed 15 people?
In the Crikey story linked above and published yesterday, reference is made to a Qantaslink incident at Sydney Airport on Boxing Day 2008, which was also covered by Plane Talking in June.
The ATSB report is woefully evasive in its accounting for this astonishing incident. A Qantaslink turbo-prop, with 50 seats, nearly stalls twice in 10 seconds on approach to Sydney airport, during which a first officer with limited experience on the type disobeys an instruction by the captain to go around rather than try and complete an ‘unstable’ approach to the runway.
The report fails to explain how standards at Qantaslink could be so pathetic as to allow this situation to arise. It fails to detail what then happened in the Qantaslink management of its safety standards. It doesn’t tell us what submissions Qantaslink made, or what submissions the CASA safety regulator made. The final report is only released after the wording has been read and passed by the airline and the safety investigator, although it can ignore objections by the parties being investigated.
The public just doesn’t get any inkling as to what really happened.
In the US the NTSB, the ATSB equivalent, would have held public hearings into the Qantaslink incident, and the airline management would have been cross examined as to how such an unacceptable situation had occurred.
The public would not have been subjected to spin about our wonderful safety standards. There is nothing wonderful about a Qantas turbo-prop being put in peril twice in 10 seconds by the flight standards that it is the obligation of the company to uphold and administer.
This proposed inquiry is of critical importance to all air travellers in Australia."
So did the Senate Inquiry make one iota of difference??
Last edited by Sarcs; 10th Sep 2012 at 22:09.