For chauvinism in air transport some sort of award should be given to French Secretary of State for transport Dominique Bussereau who called for a global blacklist of unsafe airlines this week as an extension of the European list.
M Bussereau-let's talk about bad airlines but not Air France-at an earlier press conference
Why not start with Air France? It totalled an Airbus A340 at Toronto on 2 August 2005 when a very badly flown approach in a wild thunderstorm ending in flames in a gulley just off the end of the runway. It killed 228 people on 1 June when one of its Airbus A330s flew into what were reported as very severe but avoidable thunderstorms in the mid Atlantic.
The French flag carrier made a nonsense statement that day about how the jet had been struck by lightning, which was untrue, and it admitted knowing about a serious issue with unreliable air speed indications in iced up pitots on this type of jet for months before commencing remedial action on the fleet.
How about putting Air France on the list until a full audit of its management of safety concerns in particular pilot training and checking standards is conducted instead of pontificating about other carriers, some of them admittedly very bad ones?
And including SAS for failed oversight of its low cost investment Spanair, which killed 154 people because of lousy pilot standards at Madrid on 20 August last year.
There is a lot of work to be done in Europe, M Bussereau. Why not get on with your real job, and clean up the problems at home first?
4 Comments
Great point Ben and from my previous experience in talking to ex-Air France employees working at Airbus during my visits to Toulouse, the pilots almost treat maintenance staff with contempt and there is a distinct lack of harmony between operations and engineering, which does not fit well with safety management.
I dreaded flights on Air Inter when I was based at various times in Paris. It was a shamelessly incompetent carrier, definitely the French equivalent to the British European Airlines of the same era, and was eventually taken over by Air France in the mid 90s, arguably infecting it with its culture of poor flight standards as claimed from time to time on other forums.
It all sounds to me like French PR spin – attempting to take the moral high ground on aviation safety in Europe so that no-one can point the finger at them and say they don’t do enough about it. Also a convenient diversion from some of the focus on Air France and Airbus in recent times.
Folks,
Perhaps somebody with the details can remind us of several spectacular AF non-conformances at YSSY with the Concorde, and one severe embarrassment at Tahiti, with a B747.
Back at a time when I was operating “domestically” in Europe, in this case operating an Air Algerie ex-QF 707, we were patiently waiting in a summer afternoon line of delayed aircraft at Orly, to complete the last leg of a day’s shuttle to Algiers.
To say that we were surprised was an understatement, when an AF Caravelle, somewhere behind us obviously ran out of patience (or taxi fuel), broke ranks, taxied across the grass onto the departure runway, and —- departed.
I didn’t need to speak French to understand that the controller was just a little peeved.
One Trackback