Last Friday French BEA published another interim report on AF447, the A330-200, which crashed more than a year ago in the South Atlantic killing all 228 people on board. For anybody, who is familiar with aircraft accident investigation, it is no surprise that the investigators are still far from being able to fully understand all factors, which contributed to this tragedy.
However, the day before Alonso Fernández, President of Airbus’ flight test division, has given an interview to French news magazine "Le Point", where he expressed his view on the accident: It’s been the pilots, not the aircraft. Case closed.
This interview is a shocking deviation from the well-established rules of aircraft accident investigation. One of them is that the airline, the manufacturer and the air traffic control stay absolutely quiet until the final release has been published. Breaking those rules as Airbus did is not just disgusting. It is shortsighted. And it is against the interests of the entire air transport industry and the flying public.
- Accident investigation is not about finding the one to blame, but understanding what chain of events led to an crash and what factors contributed – technical problems, aircraft systems architecture, human factors, training, ATC, weather. It’s a highly complex task and there are few accidents where the search for the cause led to a quick and simple answer. Commercial aviation is a global system of collective learning. The painstaking and unbiased analysis of all major mishaps is without comparison in any other industry. Without it the air transport system would never have achieved the high level of safety it has today.
- In recent years we have seen several cases, where accident investigators had to defend their privileged access to the crash site and all kinds of evidence against overambitious prosecutors and against aggressive lawyers looking for arguments to support their multimillion dollar claims. Just remember the crash of the Concorde in Paris or the collision of GOL 1907 with an Embraer business jet over the Brazilian jungle. The key argument of the aviation community against this kind of interference has always been the overarching public interest to increase flight safety even further. How strong will this argument be in the future, when a major player like Airbus is trying to exploit the investigation for his own interests like in this case?
And there is a moral aspect as well. When so many lives have been lost, our industry owes the victims and their next of kin to honestly determine the cause of the accident in order to prevent it from happening again.
How can you learn from what has gone wrong, when you don’t accept the possibility, that there might be contributing factors on your side, too? No matter what the final conclusions of the investigators will be, finger pointing towards dead pilots isn’t the appropriate answer.
And let's never forget: When you are pointing fingers at others, there are always three fingers pointing back to you.
Additon 12 Aug 2011
The behaviour of Air France unacceptable as well. BTW: AF/KLM is said to be poised to order 50 A350s. Will be interesting to see, where that one goes.
Additon 12 Aug 2011
The behaviour of Air France unacceptable as well. BTW: AF/KLM is said to be poised to order 50 A350s. Will be interesting to see, where that one goes.
