“We’re unable to climb,” he reported on the early morning flight to Sept-Iles on the north shore of the St. Lawrence before the last communication on June 23, 2010.
Nine seconds later, the small plane, less than 50 metres above the ground and travelling at 100 knots, disappeared from radar. It crashed into a field, hurtled 35 metres along the ground, hit a berm, then broke up and caught fire.
The two crew and five passengers survived the initial impact, but died quickly, likely from the fire’s intense heat.
Air taxi crashes common
The accident was a brutal, tragic example of a peril facing Canadians who travel and work in places served by small air operators. Because of their small size, crashes involving these companies don’t usually garner national attention. Yet they are shockingly common.
Just as shocking is the regulatory vacuum into which these small commuter operations have fallen — an issue that alarms Canada’s Transportation Safety Board.
Some recent accidents:
In November 2012 a crash near Snow Lake, Man., killed a Gogal Air Service pilot who was on the first leg of a trip to bring seven miners back to their homes in Eastern Canada.
In December 2012 a flight chartered for Keewatin Air crashed during a second landing attempt in blowing snow at the Sanikiluaq airport in Nunavut, killing a six-month-old. The aircraft belonged to Winnipeg-based Perimeter Aviation.
In January 2013, in a disaster that got publicity because of its location, a three-man crew from Calgary-based Kenn Borek Air died after their Twin Otter crashed into a steep mountain slope in the Antarctic.
Air taxis and small commuter operations are essential parts of Canada’s transportation network. They bring residents from the North back home. They transport tourists to fishing lodges. They do aerial survey work.
They carry people such as public servant Gerald Joncas, aboard that fatal 2010 flight leaving from Quebec City for Sept-Iles and operated by air taxi service Aeropro.
Joncas, a financial administrator for Canada’s Department of Aboriginal and Northern Affairs who travelled regularly to remote spots, was working on a new school project for an Innu community. At 58, he was a grandfather of two little girls, and his blended family included the two grandchildren of his partner, Rita Roy.
More than two years after Joncas died in the Aeropro crash, Roy says, “I’m sure there were times when things happened, there were some doubts or fear, but he didn’t express them.”
“I think it’s something we avoided talking about,” she says.
Aeropro’s crash was one of 44 accidents involving air taxi operations in Canada that year. Air taxi accidents accounted for more than half of the 86 commercial flight accidents in 2010 — among aircraft of any size.
In 2012, there were about three accidents a month involving air taxis: nearly half of all commercial accidents, or 34 of 72.
Together with other small operators — doing aerial surveys or patrolling pipelines, providing commuter access to remote towns, or offering chartered helicopter services — they accounted for 91 per cent of commercial aircraft accidents and 93 per cent of commercial fatalities from 2002 to 2011.
That’s 859 accidents in smaller commercial aircraft throughout the decade, and the deaths of 253 people — including 169 in air taxi crashes alone.
Safety management
These statistics “hit you in the face,” Transportation Safety Board chairwoman Wendy Tadros told Postmedia News. “That’s where we have to go in our investigations to see what we can learn and what needs to be done.”
Small air operators are being pushed to take on more direct responsibility for their own safety practices as Transport Canada — and other regulators worldwide — pull back from the detailed, routine, hands-on safety inspections they once did for all commercial aircraft.
The regulators are wrestling with how to oversee an ever-expanding civil aviation system without any growth in their own resources to monitor safety. The government’s choice of tool for this over the last decade is known as a “Safety Management System,” or SMS.
The idea is simple: require all air operators to develop their own means of identifying potential safety hazards in their operations, then make them develop plans to address them. The air operator then sets up an internal reporting system to address complaints or concerns from its own staff.
Under SMS, Transport Canada inspectors no longer routinely do what they once did: perform regularly scheduled audits and direct inspections of aircraft and personnel. Now they mostly assess, primarily by reviewing company records, whether aviation firms have their own effective safety protocols. Hands-on inspections do still happen, but much less frequently than in the past.
The transition to SMS, which began in 2005, is now complete at Canada’s large commercial carriers, which say the new system works.
But it’s in disarray at small carriers. Who’s to blame depends on whom you speak to.
The initial target date to make SMS mandatory at small carriers was 2009 but Transport Canada has indefinitely postponed the mandatory implementation of SMS for air taxi and small commuter operations, and there is confusion — and growing industry unrest — about next steps for these small commercial companies.
Despite the postponement, Transport Canada stopped its routine inspections even of the small carriers — treating each as if they actually had an SMS in place. Many feel the result has been a safety vacuum.
There are two issues: this delay in implementing SMS now that there is less direct government oversight; and whether, even if SMS were implemented, it would be the right call for small air operators.
SMS may work at a large carrier, such as Air Canada or WestJet, with internal expertise and resources to draw on, but air taxis are often run as family businesses, with slim profit margins. They are also more likely to be flown by inexperienced pilots eager to log flight hours, working under higher-risk conditions — for instance flying older aircraft or landing on remote airstrips not overseen by air traffic controllers.
Trouble ahead
There had been signs of trouble long before the latest Transportation Safety Board watch-list — and even before the Aeropro crash in 2010. The problem encompassed not just small operations.
In 2008, Sheila Fraser, then Canada’s auditor general, probed how Transport Canada handled the transition to SMS at large air carriers. She concluded Transport Canada had failed to sort out how the day-to-day work of its inspectors should change as SMS-related activities took up more time at the expense of traditional inspections.
Fraser also said she had expected Transport Canada to continue traditional oversight during the transition.
“We felt that it doesn’t make sense to have one way of inspecting an SMS company and another way of inspecting a non-SMS company,” Transport Canada assistant deputy minister of safety and security Gerard McDonald said in an interview.
The industry association representing many smaller operators says they’re ready for SMS regulations — but companies are waiting for Transport wwwCanada to set out the rules.
“I think safety consciousness is there,” said John McKenna, president of the Air Transport Association of Canada. “It’s just that some companies will always try to cut corners ... That’s what Transport Canada’s job is: it’s to make sure these people are no longer in operation.”
Safety oversight today — for all carriers — largely means periodic, on-site reviews of a company’s documentation by Transport Canada, focusing on a given operational system. In the jargon, that review is known as a Program Validation Inspection.
“We recognize smaller carriers don’t certainly have the capacity to implement the same type of SMS system that Air Canada does,” McDonald said.
McDonald said he has no qualms about boarding any plane in Canada, no matter how small.
Resources lacking
In an audit of its civil aviation division released in April 2012, auditor general Michael Ferguson found that the department completed only 67 per cent of “planned inspections” noted in Transport Canada’s 2010-11 annual surveillance plan. Annual surveillance is reserved for what are deemed higher-risk air operations, but the audit noted these high-priority inspections at about 500 companies were postponed or cancelled because resources were not available or inspectors didn’t have time.
Transport Canada won’t say if this surveillance activity backlog has been cleared, but that it’s now completing, on average, 94 per cent of scheduled inspections each month.
What we do know, is what Transport Canada did — or failed to do — with Aeropro.
The investigation report, recently made public, revealed Transport Canada conducted a PVI at Aeropro in October 2009 — and it didn’t go well. For example, inspectors discovered the company hadn’t had a chief pilot for its commuter operations for a full year. Transport Canada’s PVI manager said the department would conduct what’s known as “enhanced monitoring” at Aeropro, 90 days of intense Transport Canada scrutiny of the operator.
That “enhanced monitoring” never happened. Transport Canada’s regional director, following a risk assessment, decided against it.
Original Article
Source: canada.com
Author: Sarah Schmidt
No comments:
Post a Comment