Issue 72: November 1991

It has been a long time since Australia had a major airline accident. The last was in 1968 when a Viscount was lost near Port Hedland. Most of us that have reached our third decade can remember that accident. I was a teenager at the time and can, even now, remember exactly how I learn’t of that terrible accident via the excited news broadcasts of the electronic media. Memories of major air crashes often live longer in our minds than of most other events. And this is why we must all bite the bullet and prepare ourselves mentally for what will happen when inevitably the next accident occurs.

And occur it will.

Despite the fact that airline travel is by far the safest means of transporting one from point A to B, the truth is that we are honestly long overdue for a major accident and if it happened right now, one wonders just what the reaction would be by an otherwise sane populace. We are now so used to our jets taking off and landing without visible threat of calamity that most Australians now take it for granted that the entire system is designed to make their aircraft immune to the forces of fate.

However, the sands of time, and perhaps luck, could be fast running out in both a physical and statistical sense. The volume of air traffic in Australia now is probably two to three times greater than it was when that Viscount broke up over Western Australia. Due to decades of government penny pinching and bureaucratic inertia little or nothing was done about updating our ATC systems to cope with that extra traffic. Only with the eventual creation of the CAA has this been addressed and thus we presently find our- selves involved in one of the most complex and far reaching upgrades of the total airspace management system anywhere in the world. However, this won’t really be fully operational till well into the mid nineties and in the meantime controllers will have to handle ever increasing traffic levels often with equipment several generations out of date.

Lady Luck also has a large part to play in this scenario. As any accident investigator will quickly tell you, and as our regular Air Safety column portrays, accidents are rarely the result of just one single event. Usually a number of things will contribute to an accident, while sometimes it seems that nothing could have changed events as it was literally predestined that that aircraft would not complete its mission no matter what the crew did to intervene.

And while we fortunately haven’t had a major RPT accident for three decades, and have never had a jet accident, we have had a large number of extremely close incidents these past three years. About the only thing that intervened in some of these incidents was good ‘ol fashioned Lady Luck coming to their rescue.

Back in 1989, prior to the pilots’ dispute, we came dramatically close to losing two 737s, one at Mackay, where the aircraft lined up to land on a nearby highway rather than the runway only real- ising the error at the last moment and at Cairns where the jet just cleared hills whilst flying what could best be described as an unusual approach procedure. In retrospect, it is also interesting (and disappointing) to note that in both incidents, those public promoters of high aircrew standards, the Australian Federation of Air Pilots (AFAP), provided little assistance to the Bureau of Ay Safety Investigation (BASI) in their investigations.

If that was close then what occurred on 11 September last year on the one afternoon could have decimated our excellent RPT air safety record in one fell stroke. At Sydney airport a departing Cathay Pacific 747 was cleared for takeoff on Rv 34 simultaneously with a tug being cleared to cross that runway with an empty Qantas 747 in tow. The Cathay aircraft was fortunately able to just clear the Qantas jumbo though one wonders what the result would have been if it had been a hot summers day with little wind and the 747 had been an early, less powerful, model with a full payload. The toll on Qantas Drive alone would. have been significant let alone what would have happened to the four hundred or so people aboard the Boeing.

Later that same day another incident occurred which would have been just as immense in its impact upon our air safety record when a Qantas 747 recorded a (very) near miss with a USAF C-5 Galaxy transport over Thailand. Only Lady Luck intervened in both these incidents to keep them from becoming dreadful accidents. Fortunately, for what it is worth, both airlines were cleared of any wrong doing in both incidents though the fact remains that this one day did take us incredibly close to realising that the sands of fate can run perilously thin at any time.

A year later, and again at Sydney, another incident occurred which should also never had happened when a Thai DC-10 crew apparently misunderstood the meaning of Simops (simultaneous runway operations, a system used internationally and designed to maximise the productivity of the available runway space) and did not realise they had to pull up well short of the runway inter-section. The result was a normal and professional go-round by an inbound A320 on RW 25 though if the DC-10 had not been able to stop in time (its tyres were smoking following emergency braking) and the Airbus had not been able to spool up in time to clear the intersection the resulting impact would not only have involved the DC-10 and the A320 but also a Qantas aircraft which was holding in the vicinity of the intersection. This could have been the world’s largest single air disaster and it could have happened right here in Sydney.

It makes you think and it must make any sane person realise that no matter how much we applaud our fine airline safety rec ord, Australia, like everywhere else, enjoys this good fortune largely through a strict diligence to slavishly following established procedures, a belief in the true meaning of airmanship (in the air and on the ground) and a fair dose of good ‘ol fashioned luck. A belief in those principles must surely be the most effective means of forestalling the inevitable. Let’s hope so.