Safety is no accident

Another called for close scrutiny of a Senate committee report, tabled just days earlier (see p26), which cited concerns about the safety of budget carriers and pilot training standards.

There is no doubt that CASA is tough, and almost every Australian would say that is fine – stay that way.

One might argue that CASA didn’t act soon enough, given the gravity of the laundry list of charges levelled against Tiger Airways. In fact, one inspector has told Contrails that the more CASA looked at Tiger after the grounding the worse it became.

For Tiger Airways to have thought that it could have recommenced operations after one week is perplexing, and perhaps underscores the problem that management was not connected with the issues.

Suggestions that LCC carriers are not safe, however, are simply off the mark. Southwest Airlines – which started the LCC revolution in 1971 – is a shining example of how a low cost airline should work. It is now the world’s fourth biggest airline, with 550 737s flying to 70 cities across 35 US states carrying 130 million passengers a year, and has not lost a single passenger in an accident.

EasyJet, Ryanair and AirAsia have similar stories of fatality free service, despite rock bottom pricing.

Having robust safety management systems in place and the right personnel is not rocket science, it’s a cornerstone of aviation and must stay that way.

There is no question that CASA has shown it is a tough regulator, but that is the way it should be.

However, what should not be are the reported comments by Jetstar’s CEO Bruce Buchanan, who told Queenstown newspaper Mountain Scene that he would not fly out of the city on Air New Zealand if the ash cloud grounded his airline.

“I wouldn’t [fly Air NZ] because I sit there with the best experts in the world, telling me what the safety risks are,” Buchanan told a reporter.

“The same reason why I choose to not put my passengers in harm’s way, I wouldn’t put my family in harm’s way. ” But the fact of the matter is that Qantas and Jetstar both booked literally thousands of passengers onto Air New Zealand flights when they elected to ground their fleets.

Buchanan also said that there was not the technology in Australia and New Zealand to tell airlines the density and altitude of the ash cloud at any given time. But while that may be true in Australia, it’s not in New Zealand, which has the Light Detection And Ranging (LIDAR) optical sensing equipment to gauge the thickness of the ash cloud.

Besides, the best volcanic experts in the world said there was no danger in flying under what was a very fine ash cloud.

Qantas CEO Alan Joyce also raised the safety rationale of Air New Zealand and Virgin Australia in a letter to the airline’s eight million frequent flyers, actually naming them in the context of “airlines such as. . . ” There is an unwritten law in the aviation industry that aircraft and engine manufacturers and airlines do not use safety as a marketing weapon. In fact, the industry helps itself when it comes to safety.

Crashes or suggestions of the industry being unsafe is bad for business for everyone.

In years gone by when arch rivals Douglas and Lockheed were having problems with their respective piston engine airliners in the late 1940s, engineers from each company assisted in solving the issues.

In 1979 when McDonnell Douglas had pylon problems with its DC-10, engineers from Boeing, Lockheed and Airbus all helped solve the issue as the design was essentially common to all.

In a touch of irony in early July, Jetstar was forced to ground four of its A320s because some “routine maintenance tasks” had not been done on schedule.

Safety is paramount but must be uniting, not divisive.