On 11 July Fairfax Media published my account of the Virgin ATR 72 debacle at
Plane lucky: an aviation escape. ATSB took umbrage and published a rebuttal on 14 July at
https://www.atsb.gov.au/newsroom/correcting-the-record/. I stand by my article and deny it “contains factual errors and misunderstandings”.
Since ATSB is so defensive of its lengthy investigation let’s spell out the timeline and compare it with Indonesia’s investigation of the AirAsia QZ8501 accident.
On 20 February 2014 the pilots of a Virgin ATR 72 mis-handled control inputs and overloaded the tailplane by 47 percent beyond ultimate design capability. Nowadays we design aircraft precisely, with no extra strength “for Mum and the kids”. So it is pure luck that the structure held together. For the next 5 days nobody noticed serious damage and a visibly twisted tailplane. The critically weakened airliner stayed in service and carried hundreds of passengers until the damage was found largely by luck.
On 10 June 2014 ATSB published an interim report of the accident, which described the damage but not its cause or why the damage went unnoticed.
On 15 June 2016 ATSB published a second interim report which quantified the overload, explained its cause and alerted operators that inadvertent application of opposing pitch control inputs can catastrophically damage ATR 72 and ATR 42 aircraft. ATSB seems not to have warned operators of other aircraft with similar controls. And 28 months after the accident ATSB is still analyzing why post-occurrence inspections failed to detect such gross damage.
Meanwhile on 28 December 2014 an AirAsia Airbus A320 crashed after a series of mistakes culminating in somewhat similar control mis-handling by the pilots. It took Indonesian investigators just 12 months to recover wreckage, extract flight data, analyse a complicated accident scenario and publish a thorough analysis of what went wrong.
ATSB must explain why its investigation is taking so long, and Virgin and CASA must be held to account for why so many passengers were put in jeopardy. Otherwise Australia’s aviation luck may run out.