Australia forces Chinese A330 to fly across continent at low altitude
When a very senior Qantas captain was asked for an opinion about Australia’s air traffic control forcing a 300 passenger foreign jet to fly across the country at an altitude of less than 29,000 feet he said “That would be insane.”
“It would be one of the most dangerous things you could ask of an airliner, and it certainly wouldn’t happen here, ever.”
But it did. And how and why it did demands a high level inquiry into institutional stupidity and recklessness in AirServices Australia.
This is how it happened, on the evidence admitted in official on the record contacts with CASA, the Civil Aviation Safety Authority and the office of the responsible Minister, Warren Truss.
Last Sunday 23 March someone in AirServices Australia, the air navigation provider, required a China Southern A330-200 to fly all the way across Australia at an abnormally low altitude, because it had a faulty transponder, called an Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast or ADS-B device which this country requires for flight in private jets and airliners operating above 29,000 feet.
As noted in a story in
The Australian during the week:
The high-altitude transponder on Flight CZ302, Sydney to Guangzhou, which lets aircraft be tracked above 29,000ft, failed on the flight into Sydney on Saturday and could not be fixed before the plane returned to Guangzhou on Sunday.
Under Australian air traffic rules introduced last year, all aircraft flying above 29,000ft must be equipped with Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast equipment.
Flight CZ302 was given permission to return to China but was ordered to fly at 28,000ft while in Australian air space and had to weave around bad weather rather than fly over it. When the flight reached Indonesian air space, it climbed above 29,000ft. The federal government has confirmed the events but denied there was any safety issue for the flight.
Under Australia’s regulations China Southern was entitled to fly out of this country without a working ADS-B device if it did so within 72 hours, having made prior notification to AirServices Australia of its unserviceability (which it had) and sought approval to avail itself of the exemption provided for in the rules, which it hadn’t.
This is where institutional stupidity and recklessness, if not bloody mindedness enters the picture.
A modern, large, fast airliner rocketing across Australia at altitudes used by smaller, slower, turbo-props and even piston engined aircraft, who of themselves might not be visible to its own TCAS collision avoidance equipment, and might not aware of its passage, in skies full of tropical wet season storms and turbulence, and often beyond the reach of ATC radar, is something too ridiculous and dangerous to take seriously in Australia.
Yet China Southern CZ302 was given such conditional approval to depart. Technically this appears to have been within the rules, but in practical terms, this was not an action that could have ever been deemed safe or prudent.
The appropriate course of action would have been for AirServices Australia to notify CASA of the situation of a large jet airliner with an inoperative ADS-B unit proposing to depart from Australia through air space normally populated by smaller, slower and potentially ‘invisible’ aircraft in stormy skies.
There is no doubt among pilots spoken to for advice on this story that the paperwork would have been adjusted pronto, and that CZ302 would have flown, as intended, through the smoother, higher and decidedly safer higher altitude skies between Sydney and Guangzhou.
It does seem that the airline should have been more ‘on the ball’.
But bloody minded stupidity that put its flight at unacceptable risk also put other Australian aircraft at risk.
Why a supposedly professionally trained and knowledgeable person in authority thought that mixing an A330-200 with the much slower and lower flying aircraft that inhabit the airspace it had to fly through was a safe and proper course of action defies explanation.
It’s just plain dumb.