Crisis At The Caa

Sydney Morning Herald

Tuesday June 13, 1995

On November 10 last year, the Federal Minister for Transport, Mr Brereton, answered a question by the then Leader of the Opposition, Mr Downer, about the safety of Aero Commander aircraft, after the fatal crash at Cloncurry the previous day of a pistonengined, unpressurised model operated by World Geoscience Corporation. Mr Brereton told Parliament he had been advised by the Civil Aviation Authority "that it has no information - I repeat, no information - at the present time which would lead it to ground all Aero Commander aircraft operating in Australia".

That might have been correct on a strict, legalistic interpretation. Perhaps the CAA had no information requiring grounding of these aircraft, as distinct from other measures to tighten safety. Or perhaps not all types of Aero Commander aircraft raised the same safety concerns. But it has now become clear that the CAA did have information which gave grounds for concern about the safety of Aero Commanders, especially the pressurised, turbo-prop version of the type operated by Seaview Air, whose VH-SVQ crashed on its way to Lord Howe Island on October 2, 1994.

These safety concerns were made clear to the CAA deputy director of operations in April this year. A confidential internal memo to him stated: "At 3 Nov 1994 one of our officers knew that VH-SVQ had not in fact been checked as required by the manufacturer. We advised the minister differently on 4 Nov 94". Mr Brereton said yesterday he knew nothing of this apparent failure to keep him fully informed. And the CAA will not say whether or not its acting chief executive officer, Mr Buck Brooksbank, knew of the memo.

The memo expresses concern that "the general aviation maintenance industry widely disregards manufacturers' requirements". It also suggests manufacturers' requirements might well be "more stringent than necessary" for safe operation. And it poses the question: "Is the Aero Commander control system (or that of any other type) so constructed that less careful procedures perhaps normally used by experienced Australian (maintenance organisations) would be unsafe?". In other words, does it matter, in safety terms, that aircraft maintenance organisations do less than is required by law - that is, they do not follow the manufacturers' instructions? Most airline passengers would have no difficulty answering that. Indeed, the inconclusive tone of the memo seems to reflect a confusion within the CAA about how to respond to the huge public outcry in the wake of the Seaview crash. It says, for example, once it was discovered that maintenance organisations were rigging the ailerons on Aero Commanders by their own possibly unsafe methods, and not by the manufacturers' instructions, it would be normal to issue "an airworthiness directive to re-check the misrigged ailerons". But it hesitates to recommend such a potentially "embarrassing" course.

If this memo provides a true glimpse of the present state of the CAA, there is real cause for concern. The picture is of an organisation so unsettled by the disclosures which came to light after the Seaview crash that it first fails to keep the minister fully informed and then is racked by doubts about whether to come clean or not. The worse the CAA's administrative responsibility mess becomes, the more the safety factor - which should be the CAA's main concern - is lost sight of. That is something to which Mr Brereton must attend when he returns from overseas.

© 1995 Sydney Morning Herald

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