Any remaining doubts that action on airline safety is needed in South Asia and Asia-Pacific have been dissolved by the accidents that occurred in the first six months of 1998. After the 2 February Cebu Pacific Air fatal accident, the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) broke its characteristic neutral silence and voiced serious concern that the region as a whole was failing to implement agreed measures to improve safety oversight.
Meanwhile, in global safety terms, 1998 has not started well: there were 591 fatalities in 18 accidents during the first six months, which compares with 231 and 20, respectively, for the same period in 1997. The number of accidents is below the average for the previous 10 years, but the number of fatalities is well above the norm.
The 1998 figures have converted the three-year moving average, which had hitherto showed a gradual improvement, back into a virtual plateau. By this measure, at least, the industry's fears that accident numbers will increase in step with the growth in air transport activity are not being borne out.
Asian carriers suffered four out of the six fatal scheduled airline accidents worldwide in 1997. In the first half of 1998 the region's scheduled, charter and commuter airlines were involved in six out of the 11 fatal accidents in commercial passenger-carrying services.
Among these were the two crashes in February which were the most costly in human lives: the Cebu Pacific McDonnell Douglas DC-9-30 accident, which killed 104, and the China Air Lines (CAL) Airbus Industrie A300-600R crash in which all 196 people on board died. A month later, in March, a Formosa Airlines Saab 340 crashed, killing all 13 on board, following which Taiwanese travellers, convinced that flying was dangerous, promptly deserted the country's airlines.
There was a purge of aviation authority senior officials and Taiwan has now set up an independent safety monitoring organisation modelled on the US National Transportation Safety Board. This is still not the Asia-Pacific regional co-operation on safety oversight which ICAO has been hoping for, but Taiwan has at least taken a national step in the right direction.
ICAO's regional representative, Lalit Shah, says: "The Asia-Pacific region is increasingly becoming the owner of a series of catastrophic aircraft accidents," adding that specific regional initiatives designed to improve safety were proposed four years ago and their implementation is now "long overdue".
Shah is referring to the Co-operative Operational Safety and Continuing Airworthiness Programmes. These are intended to improve and harmonise air laws, regulations and licensing, provide ad hoc technical help, train inspectors and evaluate flight safety organisations. The first of four programmes, based in Kathmandu, Nepal, and covering South Asia, is now in its early stages, but those for South-East Asia and the South Pacific have yet to begin.
MIRROR IMAGE DISASTER
The most puzzling single accident is the year's worst so far: the CAL A300-600 crash at Chiang Kai Shek Airport in Taipei, Taiwan. This incident raises human factors questions uncomfortably similar to those posed by the same airline's accident in the same aircraft type at Nagoya, Japan, in April 1994. In both of them the crew, for different reasons, were going around from an approach when they pitched the aircraft too far nose-up, lost control, stalled and crashed on the airfield.
The questions raised are the same as those reflected in studies by ICAO and the International Air Transport Association (IATA), which have separately recorded a big rise in crew errors resulting either from insufficient pilot knowledge of aircraft systems and procedures, or pilot "proficiency failure"
The aircraft procedures and systems knowledge deficiencies, classified "H3" errors by ICAO, have been seen to rise fourfold in aircrew flying aircraft with highly automated flightdecks. The causes suggested by industry studies focus on the combination of increased aircraft complexity and the failure to adapt training appropriately to the needs of pilots flying modern aircraft.
In the case of the Taipei accident, the first question is how the aircraft came to be nearly 1,200ft (400m) too high on an instrument landing system (ILS) approach when there was only 1.85km (1nm) to go to the runway threshold. Crew recognition that it was impossible to land from such an approach path was surely the reason for the go-around decision, but how was such an error allowed to develop - especially given the familiarity with procedures at Taipei, the crew's home airport?
Among the many remaining questions, perhaps the single most crucial is why, when the lessons of Nagoya were there to be learned, did the CAL crew allow a fighter-type pitch-up angle (42°) to develop? It was from that point that the crew began to lose control. It failed to regain it until too late for a successful recovery. CAL immediately required all its crews to undergo refresher training on type, but the airline had also done that after Nagoya.
Perhaps Taiwan's new Flight Safety Commission will be able to identify the system deficiencies which allowed a 1994 disaster to repeat itself four years later.
Despite industry's efforts to make operators more aware of the phenomenon of controlled flight into terrain (CFIT), it still features frequently: the accident list shows five events and 232 victims. Normally CFIT accidents occur in the descent or approach phase, but so far this year there has been one during the climb-out from a major airport (a TAME Boeing 727 out of Bogota). In this case the standard departure procedure was not followed, and it looks as if this error was compounded by either a failed transponder or crew failure to turn it on, making it less likely that air traffic control would provide an alert.
A six-month period is normally too short a time to draw conclusions about the health of air transport flight safety. When familiar patterns are confirmed, however, conclusions are valid. Again, none of the serious accidents involved any of the world's major "Western", Australasian or Middle Eastern carriers.
ICAO and other industry bodies have consistently concluded that, in those regions which fall short of the highest airline standards, governments and their aviation authorities are the only effective agencies for improvement. The Asia-Pacific economic downturn may make it harder for politicians to push air safety initiatives higher up their priorities list. Unless they do, the danger remains that passengers may begin to spurn air transport as the Taiwanese have done, except on a wider scale.
Airline Safety Review - Fatal accidents
Airline Safety Review - Non-fatal accidents
Source: Flight International
