Air New Zealand’s CEO, Rob Fyfe, is indignant that the French accident investigation bureau, the BEA, did not take the airline’s input into its preliminary findings concerning the crash of one of its A320s into the sea near Perpignan, on 27 November last year.
But why should it have done so? The purpose of the report is to make a warning to the industry to ‘prevent improvised manoeuvres by crews making so-called acceptance flights.’
The BEA doesn’t have to negotiate with any airline about what it sees as an issue it needs to bring to the immediate attention of the industry in the interests of public safety before it makes a final determination of the cause of the accident.
The crash took the lives of four Air New Zealand flight crew, one official from the country’s air safety regulator, and two German pilots from XL Airways based near Frankfurt, during a hand back flight on the completion of a lease.
The data from the flight voice recorder picks up the reluctance of the German pilot in control to conduct a very risky recovery procedure while the jet is closing in on a planned touch-and-go landing at Perpignan.
The procedure involved disabling all of the flight envelope protections of the Airbus flight control system, lowering the gear and the flaps in readiness for what was then planned to be an aborted landing and reducing the speed of the jet to less than 160 kmh, which is at least 80 kmh slower than would have been normal in airline operation.
On the rare occasions this stall recovery manoeuvre would have been conducted by an airline pilot in real flight rather than a simulator it would have been done at an altitude of at least 4000 metres.
But at the time the German pilot was persuaded to carry out the exercise the jet was somewhere between 900 and 600 metres above the sea.
The problem for Air NZ was that it was one of their pilots pressuring the German pilot to conduct the test far too low for this to be safe. The responsibility of the BEA was to issue a warning at this this stage of its inquiry. There is a long history of training accidents that have happened to airliners that have been deliberately exposed to very challenging circumstances. This is the third loss of an airliner in a training situation by Air New Zealand, the others being the destruction of a Lockheed Electra in 1965 and a DC-8 in 1966, the latter causing two fatalities.
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Then more recently there was also the loss here in Australia of a RAAF B707 about off the coast of Sale in a low level training maneouver (asymmetic engine out). It was of course later recommended that such manoeuvers take place at much higher altitudes. When I first read the AirNZ reaction to the French inquiry I was unfortunately reminded of their reaction to Mt Erebus disaster which was denial of company responsibility.