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Jetstar chief pilots office raided by CASA

June 16, 2012 8:36 am, by Ben Sandilands A week ago Plane Talking was given an eyewitness account of what a casual observer might have called a raid on office of the Jetstar chief pilot in Melbourne by CASA inspectors. The chief pilot was told to remove himself from his office while the inspectors accessed certain records. The inspectors appeared to know exactly where to find what they were after, and soon left, allowing the chief pilot to return to his duties. An insightful report into the probable reasons for that visit by aviation writer Paul Phelan has now been published by the Aviation Advertiser and adds to the case that has been assembled here for a public inquiry into CASAs handling of safety issues related to the conduct of flights by Qantas subsidiary Jetstar and its apparent policy of protecting the image of Jetstar to the potential peril of the public but crucifying the Singapore owned Tiger Airways Australian domestic operation for what appear to be similarly grave failings. The fact that CASA is taking action in relation to Jetstar is good. Its unwillingness to share that action with the travelling public is bad, very bad. It seems to be a continuation of the disgraceful situation which preceded the Lockhart River crash in 2005, where the 15 people died at the hands of the Transair operation which CASA knew to be unsafe but failed to properly deal with, and told various parties, including a Senate committee, that it did not recognise any obligation to keep the public informed. This situation, in stark contrast to the open disclosure of information about unsafe or illegal actions by airlines in the US by its aviation regulatory and safety authorities, makes Australia a pariah when it comes to public accountability. The fact that the protection of commercial interests over the interests of the public was waived in 2011 to shame and punish Tiger Airways for its failures to comply with Australian safety rules , while Jetstar continues to experience what are manifestly systemic failings in pilot competency without similar exposure or actions by Australias authorities is cause for concern. For those who have followed the systemic inability of Jetstar pilots to find their way around the cockpit of the Airbuses they are entrusted with flying, here are just a few paragraphs from Paul Phelans report, which can be read in full at the link near the top of this page. Details are sketchy, but were told that a Jetstar Airbus A320 on a flight from Nadi, Fiji to Auckland on Saturday, June 2 was diverted to Christchurch due to weather, commenced an instrument approach there, and initiated a go-around, presumably at the published minimum approach height. At this point, we hear, the pilot in command called for go-around flaps, which is a standard call in an Airbus in a go-around situation, and the pilot not flying (or support pilot, depending on which school you went to) will normally move the flap selector from flaps full to flaps 3, however in this case the co-pilot selected the flaps to the flaps one position.

This action, according to a non-Airbus pilot who should know, means the leading edge flaps are the only lift devices that remain extended, and they come back to an intermediate position, while the other flaps retract fully, leaving the wing configured in a less than optimum lift condition for a maximum performance climb. An automatic Airbus protection system then takes over and among other things applies full power if the power levers arent already in that position. The automatic protections activate various visual and aural signals to warn the crew theres something wrong, and sometimes theres a tense period during which the crew evaluates the warnings, sorts them out and acts on them. In more serious situations, the process has been known to leave the crew without enough clues to solve the situation, depending on their training levels, which explains tragedies such as Air France Flight 447 when an Airbus A330 plunged 37,000 feet into the Atlantic in a fully stalled state, which would have been perfectly recoverable had the crew had proper situational awareness. Jetstar, and its owner Qantas, are the direct beneficiaries of the Tiger grounding, which CASA said was done because of an imminent threat to public safety, but the facts concerning these continuing failings in Jetstar are of similar gravity, in that its jets continue to be put into very risky situations because of obvious failures in the flying standards which are, as CASA has at times been keen to emphasis, the personal responsibility of its managers, and ultimately, the board of directors of the owning entity, Qantas. Both the ATSB, the independent safety investigator, and CASA, the aviation safety regulator, have argued that there are no systemic safety issues at play in Jetstar incidents in which a common factor is that of less experienced pilots not even knowing how to correctly set flap in an emergency or abnormal flight situation, and more experienced captains on Jetstar flights either failing to properly communicate with each other, or being overwhelmed by the work load caused by the uselessness of the less experienced pilot in a pressure situation. This means that CASA and the ATSB have a secret dictionary in which the systemic has been taken out of systemic, making it mean that similar breakdowns in safe flying standards in Jetstar airliners carrying hundreds of passengers that have persisted since at least 2007 are in fact totally unrelated, and that the hundreds of lives put in immediate peril in several of these incidents were not a safety concern at all. Which is of course, dangerous nonsense, but which goes unchallenged by any member of the major parties in parliament. It is obvious from the raid on Jetstar that CASA is concerned, although as usual, like the inexplicable removal of cabin floor mounted life rafts in Qantaslink flights to Lord Howe Island, or the near lethal legislative screw up that was revealed by the Pel-Air air ambulance ditching near Norfolk Island, CASA just wont respond to media questioning. Unless, by complete coincidence, it is a Singapore owned airline. If the situations at Tiger last year, and in Ansett in 2001, justified the respective groundings and threats to ground that were made by CASA (and they certainly did) then the situation at Jetstar surely merits the serving of a show cause on the airline and a very intensive program to bring its safety standards up to those which would allow it to continue operating. Remember. CASA said there were no systemic failings in the Jetstar A321 that almost crashed at Changi Airport at the end of a flight from Darwin in which the captain was distracted by his mobile telephone and both pilots claimed they thought was still above 800 feet when the landing approach was aborted. They were in fact in a modern cockpit, with multiple instruments telling them they were descending toward the ground at an alarming rate, without the wheels properly locked in the down position, without the correct flap setting, without having performed a landing check list, and audible and visible warnings

going off about configurational errors and dangerous altitudes, all while a captain unfit to be employed fiddled with his mobile phone. And CASA and the ATSB insult the public by claiming there was no systemic failure and that the safety of the flights was never in doubt. Why do they talk so much nonsense and why are they allowed to get away with it, and why wasnt Jetstar immediately served a show cause, almost a year before Tiger offended our regulations, for putting hundreds of passenger lives at risk? The reported events of the latest Jetstar incident are prima facie an indication of potentially serious risk to the public in the conduct of Jetstar flights. This requires public action by CASA and public accountability by Jetstar. No silly PR statements about proactive this and proactive that. Real action, and real accountability, as CASA demonstrated with Tiger, and with the phased performance based return to operations by that carrier. A response from Jetstar is being awaited, and it has been asked to explain why such systemic incidents continue to occur in its operations, and how it intends to stop them happening Comments (0) | Permalink