Two safety critical issues arose today, in Crikey reports about a Qantas 767 descending too low with its wheels up as it approached Sydney last Monday, and about the informal relationship between Qantas and CASA and shoddy foreign maintenance.
They raise again the question as to whether the public administration of air safety in Australia is going to be reformed promptly, or after a major crash?
The Cityflyer incident , which occurred on a Melbourne-Sydney 767 appears to be unprecedented in a modern jet airliner in terms of triggering a Ground Proximity Warning System alert telling the pilots, who have been stood down, that they were flying the jet too close to the ground without the wheels down.
The pilots realised what was happening before the warning went off, and had firewalled the throttles and commanded flap changes in a go-around procedure, but at 700 feet and dropping, the jet continued to descend before responding to their inputs.
Just how low it descended will be determined by the ATSB, which is investigating the event as a ’serious incident.’
There is an interesting clue about the sequence of events in this statement issued by Qantas this morning:
This was an extremely rare occurrence but one we have taken seriously. The flight crew knew all required procedures but there was a brief communications breakdown. They responded quickly to the situation and instigated a go around. The cockpit alert coincided with their actions. There was no flight safety issue.
The incident was reported to the ATSB and the pilots were stood down. We are supporting the ATSB’s investigation and our own investigations will determine what further action might be warranted.
The reference to a ‘brief communications breakdown’ in intriguing. What the hell was going on in the cockpit of a 254 seat jet flying the premier domestic route in Australia to cause it to end up sinking toward the tarmac, wheels up and engines screaming, seconds from what could have been an extremely ugly crash?
Qantas is responsible for the flying standards and culture of the airline. No ‘ifs’ or ‘buts’. Why has this failure of standards occurred? Was it mechanical, or was it in the piloting? Qantas management and its directors are responsible for both.
It can be argued that standards at Qantas, and the degradation of its once unquestionable safety culture, became apparent in 1999 when the QF 1 service to London ploughed into a golf course off the end of a runway at Bangkok.
The use of full reverse thrust had been ‘trained out of’ pilots in order to save money through reduced wear and tear on the braking systems and wasted fuel. It was insanely stupid. Not even the lowliest carriers in the Asia Pacific hemisphere did such a wilfully dumb thing. The jet flew a crappy approach in bad visibility to the shorter runway at the Don Muang airport then in use, the captain told the co-pilot to go around, but then reached over and retarded three of the four engine throttles without telling him, resulting in a jet that didn’t know if it was landing or going around hurtling off the end of the runway at 89 knots.
What happened inside the jet in the next half hour was also a dismal farce, culminating in the appearance of the then CEO of Qantas, James Strong, on the Channel 9 Today show assuring the viewers that this was ‘a safety enhancing experience.’
It can be argued that since then Qantas has just been dead lucky, as necessary changes in work place practices and the emphasis on efficiency created a management culture that unfortunately seems to have also assigned lesser value to safety and standards.
Yes, the safety rhetoric remained. And CASA’s oversight of the airline deteriorated into the sort of informal relationships touched on by licensed engineers union federal secretary Steve Purvinas in the other Crikey story today.
Is there any room for informal reporting of safety matters between any airline and CASA? Given that there are formal procedures related to its obligations and processes, perhaps it is time to end the corporate capture of the safety regulator and enforce the rules, to the letter.