Why Jetstar's latest incident should alarm flyers
Jetstar’s tail strike incident at Melbourne Airport this week puts another red flag over the Qantas subsidiary’s operations and the unwillingness to date of the supposed safety regulator CASA to ground or restrict its flights.
However the ATSB appears to have fast tracked its inquiry into an incident that imperiled the lives of those on the 180 seat passenger jet bound for Hobart, indicating a final report will be provided by this November.
Under previous direction the ATSB has botched and now delayed its attempts at a PelAir crash inquiry (2009) and proven incapable to date of dealing with an astonishing situation where Qantas and Virgin Australia 737s were forced to land in blinding fog with low fuel at Mildura in 2013, and an appalling screw up that caused serious undetected structural damage to a Virgin ATR turboprop in regional service in NSW in 2014.
The ATSB has abundant reasons from the recent operational history of Jetstar for its speedy reaction.
In October last year another Jetstar single aisle Airbus, this time a 215-220 seat A321 was dispatched from Melbourne Airport in such an unsafe loading balance condition for a flight to Perth that it struggled to become airborne.
The same month Jetstar dispatched an A32o from Brisbane for Melbourne a Jetstar A32o left Brisbane for Melbourne with 16 more passengers on board than advised, meaning the aircraft was about 1,328 kg heavier than the take-off weight used to calculate the take-off and landing data for the flight.
These two October 2015 incidents perforce demonstrated that Jetstar, an Australian licensed subsidiary of Qantas, had lost on two occasions the absolutely essential prerequisite of safe operations of knowing how jets were loaded and that the distribution of passenger numbers and below floor baggage or freight was within the approved safe limits that are found in the flight manuals of all jet airliners.
These incidents raised questions of safety culture in Jetstar that have not yet been answered by an ATSB inquiry, nor addressed by CASA, the gutless safety regulator that conducted a grandiose grounding of Singapore owned Tiger Airways in 2011 after it infringed safe minimum altitude requirements over the Leopold estate near Geelong during a night time go-around at Avalon Airport.
CASA was justified in grounding Tiger, but was it justified in treating Jetstar with comparative indifference over a series of equally disturbing incidents at Melbourne, Cairns and Singapore Airports in earlier years?
The response of CASA to persistently unsafe practices or attitudes by Tiger was to first ground the carrier, and then restrict the number of sectors it could fly each day until it acquired a safety culture and a respect for the regulations.
The safety culture of Jetstar ought to be in the dock of public opinion over the October 2015 incidents, and as the ATSB says in its notification of an investigation, the loading data for last Wednesday’s flight will be part of that inquiry.
Why Jetstar's latest incident should alarm flyers - Plane Talking