Passenger reaction when faced with unfamiliar and seemingly dangerous events should not be condemned, but understood.
The Phuket Air passengers who protested just before take-off that their aircraft was not safe to get airborne because of fuel spillage from a surge tank vent were actually wrong. They were right that such an event is less than the ideal, but the Boeing 747-200 could have departed safely.
Following checks at Sharjah the aircraft (HK-VAO) finally took off for London Gatwick, arriving on 4 April. But during examination by the UK Civil Aviation Authority the agency established it was not fully equipped for a safe emergency evacuation. So the passengers were right in their general prognosis: the aircraft did not comply with international standards for airworthiness, but they had chosen the wrong safety symptom as their reason to act. The UK Department for Transport (DfT), acting on the CAA's report, allowed the aircraft to depart from Gatwick, but with no passengers.
Phuket Air subsequently went through the kind of trial-by-media nightmare all airlines fear. In this case much of the nightmare was of the airline's own making, but from time to time other airlines suffer the media's unique brand of vigilante justice when there is, in fact, no problem, but the passengers insist there is. Aircraft that have to go-around from short final approach for operational safety reasons are a classic case in point.
In the Phuket Air case, although nobody was actually hurt, passengers were frightened and voluble, enabling some of the press to indulge in a frenzy of horror stories about the airline in particular and air transport in general. The stories were given a shot in the arm when, the day after the fuel-spill events a Phuket Air 747-300 (HK-VAN) arrived at Gatwick from Sharjah more than 11h late, after rectification of hydraulic problems. The final boost came when, on 6 April, HK-VAN left Gatwick with 82 passengers on board, but an hour into the flight the crew had to shut an engine down after the just-changed gearbox oil pump seal was found to be leaking. The crew decided to return to Gatwick, where they landed safely. On 8 April the aircraft was still there awaiting an engine change, but it was grounded by the DfT anyway until its traffic alert and collision avoidance system (TCAS) could be repaired or replaced. The latter was a fault that the CAA found had been deferred contrary to regulations.
Ironically, last month Phuket Air announced that its last thrice-weekly flight on the Bangkok-Gatwick route would be on 23 April, "due to some complaints" about the 747-200 used on the route, which it said was due for maintenance. It has, however, started twice-weekly services to Amsterdam using 747-200s because it had "made commitments" to tour operators there.
What lessons are there here for airlines? The simplest is that all passenger aircraft should be externally smart, the cabin should be fresh and clean, and everything the travellers use should work. If passengers see a shabby aircraft and cabin, particularly in a veteran aircraft, they get nervous, and then if anything unfamiliar happens or they think something has gone wrong, as far as they are concerned their fears have been "confirmed". No-one can blame the passengers for that, and any airline inclined to do so is in the wrong business.
It is not rare for flightcrew, having read newspaper reports about events like this, to rail against passengers who "don't know what they are talking about". The crew's feelings are a gut reaction to their perception that some passengers do not trust them with a job they do proudly. But pilots or flight engineers who think beyond their own hurt feelings can empathise with people who are not experts and do not claim to be. Passengers, above all, need to be told what is going on, because otherwise how would they know? The Phuket Air passengers were not told what was going on.
There have been times when, if information from passengers had been heeded by the crew, accidents could have been prevented. The classic was the 1989 Boeing 737-400 crash at Kegworth, UK on final approach to land. Part of a fan blade had detached, badly damaging an engine. The passengers saw the engine emit flame and told the cabin crew, but the message never reached the flight deck because the stewardess assumed the pilots knew. The pilots shut down the wrong engine and 47 people died.
Airlines cannot afford to ignore what passengers say nor what they think. To do so is bad both for safety and for business.
Source: Flight International
