A passenger jet operated by one of Air Canada’s regional feeder airlines had crashed shortly after takeoff on a snowy runway, killing 24 of 69 people aboard. When he submitted 1,712 pages of findings to the federal government, Moshansky revealed an aviation safety system that was broken, its problems extending well beyond any one airline.
Sloppy safety practices and questionable procedures at Air Ontario had thrived because of Ottawa’s dual policies of civil-aviation deregulation and government-wide fiscal restraint, Moshansky concluded.
Now 84, Moshansky has remained a magnet for industry intelligence since his landmark report. He was given the Aviation Safety Award by Transport Canada in 1995, and in 2004 was named to the Order of Canada for his work on aviation safety.
So when, despite statistics to the contrary, he says he’s worried about the current safety of commercial aviation, he is not easy to dismiss.
More than 20 years after his report was tabled in the House of Commons, he says conditions at the federal government’s safety regulator appear to be a “carbon copy” of what led to the Dryden crash. He thinks Canada should hold a new commission of inquiry into air safety, not wait until the next “big” tragedy.
Still, his concern appears baffling. The numbers show that air travel, both in Canada and worldwide, has never been safer.
Canada’s aviation accident rate is the lowest it’s ever been, and passenger-aircraft accidents that do occur here usually involve small air-taxi operations, not major airlines carrying hundreds of people.
The London-based firm Ascend, which provides data to aerospace investors, reports that 2012 was the safest year yet for air travel.
The International Air Transport Association, which represents more than 240 major airlines comprising 84 per cent of total air traffic worldwide, agrees. In its end-of-year analysis, IATA reported that the accident rate among its members in 2012 was the lowest yet. As of the end of 2012, it said, there was one accident per five million flights among western-built jets.
“That tells you how safe we are,” Guenther Matschnigg, the IATA’s senior vice-president of safety, operations and infrastructure, told Postmedia News. But, he added, “It’s not zero and because it’s not zero, we still have some work to do.”
Canada’s last big commercial crash was the 2011 First Air Boeing 737 crash in Resolute Bay, Nunavut. Twelve people died and three survived. It was the first accident in 18 years involving passenger fatalities at a major airline in Canada.
Aircraft design and technological advances in next-generation passenger jets are two reasons for the unparalleled safety statistics.
But there’s another component many believe is helping improve performance: the development of Safety Management Systems — or SMS — as part of what federal Transport Minister Denis Lebel calls Canada’s “flexible framework” of safety oversight.
SMS is required at all major airlines in Canada and is being phased in at large commercial carriers around the world. Calling Canada a “forerunner” in using the system, Matschnigg said the world is now “catching up.”
“It’s the right thing to do operationally, and not only makes you safer, it makes your airline work better,” added Bill Voss, a U.S. Federal Aviation Administration safety executive.
The oversight system is a radical departure from the inspection system, based on Moshansky’s recommendations, which was built up after the 1989 Dryden crash — and so it has detractors, including some pilots, inspectors and, not surprisingly, Moshansky himself.
SMS places the onus on air carriers to identify safety risks in their operations — without a government inspector standing over them.
Instead of the operational audits and regular front-line inspections once done by Transport Canada inspectors — such as ramp checks of aircraft, inflight inspections and check rides with on-board inspectors assessing the pilot — government inspectors now mostly examine a sample of company records, or records of specific safety incidents, to see if the company’s safety management system handled problems properly. Federal inspectors no longer routinely examine planes and personnel as part of regularly scheduled activities.
“Regulators around the world ... are becoming more constrained. They’re outnumbered. If all you’re relying upon are regulators to catch you doing something, safety is going to spiral downward,” Voss said.
Critics think it still could.
One pilot who spoke with Postmedia News likened SMS to asking a speeding driver to write himself a ticket. Moshansky said it’s “like the fox guarding the henhouse.” He charges that SMS enables the government to download the expanding cost and burden of ensuring safety onto the airlines.
For example, in Canada the shift to SMS resulted in the April 2006 cancellation of Transport Canada’s national audit program in civil aviation, which Moshansky considered one of the department’s most important watchdog activities. These detailed inspections were carried out at three- to five-year intervals.
Then, in November 2006, as part of the transition to SMS, Transport Canada told its aviation inspectors not to launch any more enforcement investigations into violations of air safety rules, and ordered all open cases abandoned against carriers that now had an SMS.
The following year, Transport Canada ceased conducting its own pilot proficiency checks. Instead, approved “check pilots” — working for air carriers to check the competency of their own pilots — are now certified by the department.
These changes worry Moshansky, who says strong safety cultures at airlines can’t be taken for granted. Transport Canada’s approach to SMS assumes this, he suggests.
“Inspectors have become paper shufflers, like they did in the transition before the Dryden crash,” he said. “The only thing they’re conducting oversight on is the paperwork being kept by the airlines themselves.”
The government argues SMS adds an additional layer of safety, enhancing the work Transport Canada continues through its oversight program, but in a different form.
“It’s not any less rigorous an inspection,” said Gerard McDonald, Transport Canada’s assistant deputy minister of safety and security.
“You can be sure that if the accident rate was rising, we’d be getting the full brunt of the blame for it, so when it’s falling, please, give our people some credit.”
SMS is hardly perfect, though. Just last month, the Transportation Safety Board excoriated Sunwing Airlines for failing to even report a technical problem that forced it to return to Toronto’s Pearson airport right after takeoff on a flight to Mexico in March 2011.
Still, Canada’s major airlines are big boosters of SMS. They say government oversight is robust and a culture of safety now permeates all levels of their operations. Industry best practices, not minimum standards set out in regulations, are how they measure themselves, they say.
Capt. Rod Graham, Air Canada’s director of fleet operations and training, used to work at Transport Canada as a pilot inspector. At Air Canada, he experienced the transition to SMS. “I know the sound bite: ‘There’s less oversight.’ There’s not really,” he said. “But there’s progressive oversight. There’s intelligent oversight.”
Robert Deluce, president of Porter Airlines, added: “(SMS) has helped us to promote a strong safety culture at Porter, getting every team member to buy into that culture and philosophy and to be very much engaged in making safety part of our DNA, if you will.”
“The first thing we talk about, every single day, in every meeting I have, is safety,” said Air Transat president Allen Graham.
“It’s very much a shared responsibility based on transparency,” Capt. Scott Wilson, WestJet’s vice-president of safety, said.
Still, there have been growing pains.
As an example, records released by Transport Canada under the Access to Information Act show a senior executive at Air Canada wrote to the department in the spring of 2011 to say, “We are concerned that this approach (SMS) has lost its way and is engendering a culture of ‘paper safety’ at the expense of real safety.”
Air Canada says its concerns have been worked out.
Yet the implementation of SMS has been slow and, in some cases, secretive. Transport Canada declined to provide information about SMS assessments at any airlines.
The SMS safety culture “is an evolution that has to take place and it doesn’t just happen in a few years,” Jacques Mignault, director of flight safety and operational security at Air Transat, said.
Some pilots working at major airlines see SMS differently, but spoke with Postmedia News only on condition on anonymity.
Pilots get a close-up view of incidents fed into internal SMS reporting systems and into Transport Canada’s database. But unlike one incident in January, when a landing-gear wheel fell off an Air Canada Jazz flight at Pearson airport and captured headlines, these incidents rarely make the news.
The pilots say they’ve witnessed problems such as an engine shutting down, smoke in the cockpit, a hydraulic failure and a tailstrike on takeoff. “I would suggest that all of these things had accident potential at one point or another,” a pilot with 40 years of experience said.
“The government handed over the keys to SMS to the carriers and let them run it, and the idea was they’d be watching them like a hawk to make sure that they followed through and, well, they’re not.”
Gord Marshall worked in Vancouver and Kelowna, B.C., during his 17-year career at Transport Canada, where he inspected maintenance operations. He left in 2006.
Transport Canada, he said, asked, “‘OK, how can we reduce the qualifications and the number of people and then justify it?’”
Transport Canada’s civil aviation action plan — prepared in response to an auditor general’s 2012 audit showing significant gaps in oversight — acknowledges it is operating in an “era of fiscal restraint,” and it’s having trouble keeping up with its oversight duties.
Moshansky is alarmed. “They don’t have the bodies and they deliberately set out to reduce the number of inspectors in order to save money. That’s what they did prior to Dryden.” In the early days of his inquiry, Moshansky recalls, it was also difficult to get information from Transport Canada and the air operators. The gaps in information today, he says, are one of the reasons “why we need a new commission of inquiry into the state of aviation safety in Canada — badly.”
Original Article
Source: canada.com
Author: Sarah Schmidt
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