CASA 'cover-up'

Friday, 01 June 2007 10:25

The Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) continues to cover up its failure to properly monitor Transair, the airline involved in the fatal Lockhart River crash in May 2005, failures that contributed to the tragic accident in which 15 people died, a Senate Estimates hearing has been told.

CASA CEO Mr Bruce Byron denied under questioning from Queensland Labor Senator Jan McLucas during a late-night sitting on Monday night that he said: “I am unable to accept the conclusion that in the Australian Transport Safety Bureau report (on the Lockhart River crash) that the Civil Aviation Safety Authority contributed to factors that caused the accident.”

In Estimates he said: “That is not what I said.”

A copy of the media statement he made which contained those words is available on Senator McLucas’s web site, www,janmclucas.net.

Senator McLucas says this original version of the media statement has been removed from the CASA web site and links to it in other CASA statements have also been removed.

“The families of the victims of Lockhart River and the Labor Party have already called on Mr Byron to be dismissed for those remarks, and to apologise,” Senator McLucas said. “For him now to deny that he ever said them is grossly inappropriate.

“If he had one shred of decency left, or one iota of compassion for the victims’ families, he should immediately resign.”

Senator McLucas also said Mr Byron’s comments raised the prospect of CASA refusing to implement the recommendations of the ATSB inquiry to prevent its failings from contributing to future aviation accidents.

Senator McLucas said CASA had a history of refusing to accept recommendations, one of which was a contributing factor to the Lockhart River accident.

In Estimates on Monday night, Mr Kym Bills, executive director of the ATSB, said that following the runway overshooting by a Qantas Jumbo jet in Bangkok in 1999, ATSB found that CASA inspectors needed guidance on airline organisational and system safety issues.

According to Mr Bills, in 2000 CASA said it was going to address the issue of guidance: “We said, ‘Thanks, we hear what you are saying’ but we nevertheless issued a recommendation in 2001 along the lines that you really need to do a lot more in this area.”

Mr Bills’s evidence indicated that CASA had not engaged system safety specialists until 2006, well after the Lockhart River crash.

He said: “CASA has done excellent work I am sure in employing these system safety specialists, but I think that is really a recognition that things were not as good as they could have been before then.”

Senator McLucas said a key finding against CASA was: “The investigation also identified contributing safety factors relating to the regulatory oversight of Transair by CASA. In particular, CASA did not provide sufficient guidance to its inspectors to enable them to effectively and consistently evaluate several key aspects of operators’ management systems.”

“There is a direct link between the failures of CASA and the crash of Transair Metroliner VH-TFU,” Senator McLucas said. “The CEO of CASA, Mr Bruce Byron, refuses to accept this and by doing so is putting the travelling public at risk.”

 

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