Ben's piece summarises this morning's hearing very well
:
Pel-Air Senate hearing sensation: CASA hid key safety audits from ATSB
In a set of extraordinary disclosures in the Senate inquiry into the Pel-Air crash report today it was revealed that two key safety audits were kept secret by the safety regulator CASA from the safety investigator the ATSB in contravention of a cooperative memorandum of understanding between the two bodies.
The two most senior officers in the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, its chief commissioner Martin Dolan and its GM air investigations Ian Sangston did not know of the existence of the audits, one of which was scathingly critical of CASA’s oversight of Pel-Air, until about 30 minutes before they appeared at the inquiry immediately after an often intense examination of CASA’s Director Aviation Safety John McCormick.
One document, the Chambers Review of CASA, ordered by McCormick and kept secret from the ATSB, found that the ditching of a tiny Westwind air ambulance flight near Norfolk Island in November 2009 might have been avoided had the regulator been doing its job properly.
The other, a fatigue management review of the ill fated flight commissioned from the UK safety regulator, suggested that the captain of the flight Dominic James may have been unfit to fly the Careflight mission under its rules.
CASA’s director of air safety John McCormick said he didn’t consider either of them relevant to the cause of the accident, which he says was entirely the fault of the captain, but would have been made available to the ATSB if it has asked for them.
Senator David Fawcett, an experienced pilot, and Senator Nick Xenophon, the instigator of the hearing, pointed out to McCormick repeatedly in the exchanges between them and him that the ATSB could not ask for audits it didn’t know existed, and that under the rules of co-operation between the two bodies, their existence had to be disclosed.
What then followed was a lengthy spectacle in which the most senior executive in CASA, McCormick, denied understanding or recognising the most basic and clearly written obligations that exist in the MoU between the two bodies concerning the exchange of information between them.
The Senate committee is inquiring in the final report by the ATSB into the accident, and how it became changed from one dealing with serious issues concerning the rules relating to fuel and route planning to one that blamed the crash almost entirely on the actions of the captain.
Senator Xenophon told ATSB chief commissioner Dolan that the Pel-Air report the ATSB had finally issued was less compliant with the standards of ICAO Annex 13 than those produced by its counterparts in Nigeria and Lebanon, a comparison strongly rejected by Dolan.
Both the fatigue audit and the CASA audit, which is separate from the CASA special audit into Pel-Air shortly after the crash, will be posted online on the Senate Committee website later today.
At the outset of today’s hearing Senator Fawcett speaking for the committee said it accepted that errors in fueling the jet that was ditched off Norfolk Island were made by the captain, and that the purpose of the inquiry was not to exonerate the pilot but to examine more deeply how the ATSB report was arrived at, and among other things, understand why it said little to explain why the pilot might have made the errors he did.
The committee repeatedly sought information from the CASA team lead by McCormick as to why the regulator had not disclosed the Chambers Review, commissioned by McCormick, to the ATSB, quoting passages in which it found that had there been more effective auditing and oversight of Pel-Air, the operator of the jet, it would have discovered key failings in its performance and pilot training from interviews with the line pilots that if acted upon in a timely manner could have prevented the accident ever happening.
McCormick said he considered the Chambers Review a private document, which made no findings which would have altered the ATSB’s eventual findings that the accident was caused by pilot error if not violations of the rules by him. He said “I did say at the time that I wanted it warts and all.”
Xenophon told McCormick his explanation for withholding the Chambers Review’s existence and findings from the ATSB to be “curious and bizarre.”
McCormick told the hearing that CASA had kept the findings of the Chambers Review from the ATSB in order “not to contaminate its decision making.”
He stressed the importance CASA placed on the ATSB reaching its own conclusions.
However during the course of the hearing committee members read from emails which said, among other things, that the two bodies needed to avoid “putting egg on each other’s faces”, that a consistent policy on whether or not flights should immediately divert to alternative airports when the weather deteriorated below minimums at destination airports, and other email discussions as to how the initially divergent views of CASA and the ATSB about the seriousness of the accident and were coming into alignment.
Pel-Air Senate sensation CASA hid key safety audit from ATSB | Plane Talking
However after reading the tabled documents I would say the genie is well and truly out of the bottle and no amount of crat spin will get the cork back in...hmm Senators take a bow!!
ps actually Oleo I think it was Beaker himself check out number '02 ATSB_Doc_5' pg 1 para 2 of Beaker reply e-mail (from tabled doc 12)!
Correction to above Oleo it was actually an 'ATSB officer's' email to Beaker and Sanger...apologies!