Virgin pilots have made safety check mistakes: engineers
By MATTHEW DENHOLM
06mar03
VIRGIN Blue has been forced to defend its safety record against claims of recent serious lapses.
Aircraft engineers yesterday outlined a series of faults alleged to have been missed in safety checks by pilots last month.
Virgin Blue ended pre-flight safety checks by licensed aircraft maintenance engineers in late January.
It directed its pilots to perform the visual checks between flights.
The move has been approved by the Civil Aviation Safety Authority, but was yesterday condemned by former CASA maintenance standards chief, Ken Cannane.
Mr Cannane explained to The Daily Telegraph that pilots were insufficiently skilled to detect all faults which can emerge in aircraft.
"They are happy to spend money training pilots but they want to cut costs on maintenance down to nothing," Mr Cannane said.
"This is mad cost-cutting."
CASA spokesman Peter Gibson said the safety watchdog had no problem with pilots conducting the pre-flight checks – just as long as they were being performed properly.
He said Virgin Blue had promised to improve the checks after CASA surveillance found cases of pilots cutting corners and rushing.
"We will be doing surveillance on them fairly regularly and if we find that improvements haven't been made, we'll take further action if necessary," Mr Gibson said.
"From our perspective it doesn't matter who does the checks – pilots or engineers – as long as they are done properly."
But the Licensed Aircraft Engineers Association pointed to six cases between February 10 and 27 when pilots allegedly didn't do the checks properly.
The most serious of these is that a pilot failed to detect a bird strike in an engine of a plane at Brisbane airport on February 24.
After an engineer spotted feathers and blood, an inspection found severe damage and the engine was replaced.
Virgin Blue head of commercial operations David Huttner said the pilot involved went off duty sick. But he said the replacement pilot would have spotted the damage if the engineer had not done so first.
Other allegations include:
A pre-flight safety check was signed as completed by crew before a plane had even arrived at its Sydney airport terminal.
A pilot safety check failed to detect a 3cm-deep tyre puncture on a flight from Adelaide. A broken landing light got through another check at Adelaide.
Mr Huttner said he was unable to respond to all the allegations yesterday, but believed they would prove to be "highly misleading".
"The union is trying to use scare tactics to drive its own agenda, when CASA and Boeing do not reach the same conclusion," he said.
"They both say the procedures we are using are the appropriate ones."
He said Virgin had an excellent safety record.
Of course you'd believe Peter Gibson before the former head of Maintenance Standards, Mr. Cannane, whom I believe was sacked by CASA over this issue!?
