ATSB puts itself on the MH370 search stage
Why is the ATSB claiming a place in the MH370 spotlight when it hasn’t the decency and commitment to properly investigate the lesser mystery of the crash of an Australian jet into a different ocean more than four years ago?
The Australian Transport Safety Bureau
putting up its shingle as a an investigative authority in the disappearance and search for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 is ironic for an organisation that botched its inquiry into the crash of a small corporate jet, a Westwind operated by Pel-Air, into the sea near Norfolk Island in 2009.
Unlike MH370, the precise location of the crashed Pel-Air jet is known, and all six people on board the medivac flight from Apia to Melbourne survived, although one remains seriously injured and uncompensated five years after the accident.
Despite this the flight data recorder on the downed jet, and its potentially embarrassing insights into the weather advice given its pilots, has not been recovered. The ATSB produced a much criticised and ridiculed report into the crash, which did not even discuss the safety lessons learned from the crash, during which the safety equipment on board the jet failed to work as intended.
The chief commissioner of the ATSB, Martin Dolan, was severely criticised by a Senate committee for the testimony he gave to it during its inquiry into the processes that led to its accident report, and John McCormick, the director of aviation safety at CASA, apologised to the hearings for withholding from the ATSB an internal document that found that CASA could have prevented the crash in the first place had it carried out of duties of oversight over Pel-Air.
The leading voices in that damning inquiry were coalition Senator David Fawcett and independent Senator Nick Xenophon, and the public shame and anger associated in aviation circles with the Pel-Air crash report remains unresolved.
The ATSB’s ‘MH370 investigation’ page currently features three background papers that are factually correct, but repeat word for word information that has already been set out with clarity by the Joint Agency Coordination Centre, led by Air Chief Marshal Houston (ret’d).
The
JACC site is more useful than the ATSB site in that it also carries transcripts of media briefings in which many of the questions or issues not addressed by the ATSB pages are explored in detail.
The ATSB’s positioning of itself in the MH370 investigation would be far more convincing if it were to withdraw and redo its disgracefully incomplete and inadequate final report into the Pel-Air crash of 2009, starting with the retrieval and reading of the flight data recorder from its know location.
A collection of stories relevant to the Pel-Air crash can be found
here. The report of a Senate committee into the ATSB’s handling of the Pel-Air crash investigation and the current government’s response can be found
at this link. (It is important to read both.)
Senator Fawcett’s parliamentary speech concerning the integrity of CASA and the ATSB in relation to Pel-Air
can be found here, with a full copy from Hansard.
The question remains. Why is the ATSB claiming a place in the MH370 spotlight when it hasn’t the decency and commitment to properly investigate the lesser mystery of the crash of an Australian jet into a different ocean more than four years ago?