Interesting article from Ben today, perhaps explains why there has been little coverage from Fairfax media on any significant Oz aviation safety issues like the Pel-Air inquiry or the ASA series of BOS events. Not that News Limited is much better!!
Q/ Does the Fairfax group even have a reputable investigative journo on their books anymore? Oh well Fairfax will continue to fade into obscurity...let's just hope the Senators keep turning over those stones...
Qantas safety ‘list’ story is also about Fairfax’s decline
Ben Sandilands | Jan 12, 2013 3:41PM | EMAIL | PRINT
If Fairfax is prepared to give top of site billing to the rankings done by the tiny Jet Airliner Crash Data Evaluation Centre based in Hamburg without telling its readers exactly how Finnair ended up on top, and Virgin trumped Qantas, and so forth, it is making itself a party to something very odd to say the least.
Fairfax media is currently leading its online advertorial, lifestyle, spruiking, and supposed news and analysis sites with a story about how Qantas has been bumped down a list of world’s safest airlines.
List stories are in general a nonsense, and seldom tolerated by serious news organisations without a detailed investigation of the methodologies, qualifications and financial affairs of those claiming to be able to make a list of safest airlines, or best lounges, or top resorts, or whatever brain dead nonsense a so called news organisation wants to serve up.
In this case Fairfax is publicising a small German group which has declared in a listing based on parameters not fully disclosed on its website that the world’s safest airline is Finnair, and that Air New Zealand, is the world’s second safest carrier, and Virgin Australia, is ninth, and that Qantas is 13th. It sees this as a ‘downgrade’ of Qantas safety. Seriously? There is much to report, analyse and discuss in matters Qantas, but according a supposedly enthusiast but pay-for-use site in Germany with the credibility to ‘downgrade’ Qantas is absurd.
This is the same Fairfax that has invested scarcely any time even reporting the privileged disclosures of grave safety deficiencies in CASA, the ATSB, Airservices Australia, and in the operations of Jetstar and Pel-Air, even though they have been served up on a plate in Senate committee hearings and protected air safety investigation reports for several years.
It is a Fairfax with some excellent reporters that nevertheless appears to be managerially totally gutless and unfocused when it comes to directing resources into real coverage of seriously relevant matters for its readerships even when they are begging for attention.
But list stories, especially those with PR involvement, are pushed out, even when they are manifestly unsatisfactory in terms of lack of details or have credibility red flags fluttering all over them.
There is no question, on the publicly available safety data, that all of the top 13 carriers in the list have good safety records today. But the rankings are strange.
If Fairfax is prepared to give top of site billing to the rankings done by the tiny Jet Airliner Crash Data Evaluation Centre based in Hamburg without telling its readers exactly how Finnair ended up on top, and Virgin trumped Qantas, and so forth, it is making itself a party to something very odd to say the least.
The courageous and truthful way of dealing with air safety matters that relate directly to Australian carriers and those foreign carriers that Australians most often fly on based on BITRE statistics would be to review the safety literature comprising accident and incident investigations and the evidence and submissions provided to parliamentary committees, including the unfinished business of the Pel-Air report issued by the ATSB last August which is the subject of a Senate inquiry.
Why are serious incidents being kept from clear public view in this country? Why didn’t CASA act against Pel-Air when it found it in serious breach of its safety obligations at the time of the air ambulance ditching near Norfolk Island in 2009?
Why did CASA ground a Singapore owned airline Tiger Airways for safety breaches yet take no action against the AOC of Jetstar when two pilots who couldn’t even speak to each other in the cockpit did nothing to correct the trajectory of an A321 flying toward a landing at Singapore Airport when the captain was so focused on his mobile phone that the first officer had to disregard his last minute instructions to land the flight on his own and instead initiated a go-around when it was around 400 feet above the ground and improperly configured for a touchdown?
Why is Fairfax running trivial and absurd list stories when the public administration of air safety in this country has gone to hell in a hand cart without it paying the slightest attention?
Quite possibly because unless it comes neatly wrapped up in a press release it hasn’t the capability or will to go out and commit real journalism, hard, time consuming, and often costly journalism, that will produce stories readers will pay for.
Qantas safety list story also about Fairfax's decline | Plane Talking