By David Learmount in London
Some air charter operations may have become accident-prone because of a hiatus in Federal Aviation Administration oversight, says the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) in a report into a Bombardier Challenger 601-1A crash that killed three.
US Part 135 operators were left without proper FAA safety oversight for nine years according to a board member statement added to the NTSB accident investigation report into the 28 November 2004 crash of an Air Castle Challenger 601 just after take-off at Montrose, Colorado, in which three died and the other three on board were seriously injured.
The probable cause of the crash – as outlined soon after the accident in the NTSB’s factual findings – is that the aircraft went out of control because the wing was contaminated with snow and ice. A contributory factor was that the crew did not have recent flying experience in similar conditions.
“This accident investigation is significant for a number of reasons. It represents a whole subset of the aviation industry that is growing and that deserves more attention from us and more oversight by the FAA. While it is true that the crew’s failure to inspect the wings for contamination was the immediate cause of the accident, there were factors involved in this accident that are factors in other Part 135 air charter operations that should be addressed before they become causal to future accidents involving air charters,” the board reports.
The NTSB explains the lack of oversight of the Part 135 sector: “In the mid-1990s, FAA dissolved its Part 135 branch in the flight standards department. FAA reinstated the branch last year, but that segment of the industry went without significant FAA headquarters’ oversight for nine years, coincidentally during a time of steady growth in the industry.” The FAA still does not have the resources for the sector’s proper oversight, says the board.
There are often complex deals whereby operators do business under a different name than that expected by the client, the NTSB explains, observing that “if federal investigators who spent months looking at this accident cannot clearly decipher the structure and relationships of the various entities associated with the certificate-holder, how could consumers be expected to untangle the threads of ownership and responsibility?”
Even charter brokers carrying out research on the safety of operators for clients can miss obscure irregularities, says the report, observing that the Air Castle aircraft was “registered to Hop-a-Jet, and operated by Air Castle Corporation doing business as Global Aviation Glo-Air flight 73”. According to the NTSB: “Under sanctioned FAA practices, certificate-holders are authorised to conduct business under other fictitious business names, or DBAs [‘doing business as’] as long as they list the alternate names in their operations specifications.”
Source: Flight International
