Safer skies: APEC investigates
Ten days after an airplane crash that killed the Polish President, and as the eruption of the volcano, Eyjafjallajökull kept 95,000 flights grounded; aviation experts from government, academia and industry assembled at the Singapore Aviation Academy for the APEC Air Accident Investigation Workshop. The meeting was not, incidentally, correlated to the dramatic events occurring that week but to the APEC priority that people, and the supply chains they depend on, should be safe and secure.
Specifically, the group discussed ways to better investigate air accident sites and drew from first-hand experiences in economies across the Asia-Pacific. For investigators, the scene of an accident is not an end but, rather a beginning.
"The accident investigator needs to get access to information very quickly," explains Alan Stray, Director International at the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, "particularly in a large passenger carrying aircraft." By retrieving the flight information recorder or a cockpit voice recorder, investigators can get vital information back to the site and assist rescuers. And, in the long-term, the ability to trace the source of failure is critical to preventing additional accidents.
According to Stray, a fault in one aircraft might point to a flaw throughout an entire fleet or engine series. Similarly to an automobile recall, a 'service bulletin' or - at a more serious level - an 'air worthiness directive' may need to come from the government safety regulator in the economy of manufacture. "There are hundreds of these every year, across the various makes of aircraft and this is an on-going safety improvement process that is widely accepted in the industry."
In other cases, he says, the problem may be procedural. There may be a glitch in the way that things have been done for months. "You look back in your investigation and you don't just point to the guy who did it wrong. You ask why he did it wrong."
About 70 percent of air accidents can be attributed to "human error", estimates Stray. However, he explains, "human error can occur anywhere along the chain - from production to maintenance to navigation - and it is not generally malicious. There are slips and lapses... but there are not normally violations. We are talking about honest mistakes and so it is not about placing blame. It is about identifying a problem and avoiding it in the future."
The APEC Air Accident Investigation Workshop encourages information sharing between economies and at all levels. It is not, Stray explains a "developed or developing economy thing. It's more that our methods are changing so rapidly. None of us knows everything about all of the issues."
It is also not a matter of junior versus senior. "The aim of these conferences is that people go back to their agency and share materials with their colleagues. Participants come from a range of levels of expertise so that they can build their knowledge-base. Hopefully, people will go away with a better understanding of the tools at their disposal."
Considering the number of hours that Stray has spent, assessing the source of aircraft disasters - the majority of which he has attributed to genuine errors - one wonders how comfortable he feels on commercial planes.
He laughs: "I fly an awful lot!"