Thai International and Garuda Indonesia were caught red handed flying their jets into Australian airports in a dangerous and unprofessional manner in 2007 and 2008 but you’d scarcely know it if you read the summaries of the final reports into these incidents by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau this week.
This is because the ATSB is not there to give blunt warnings to the Australian public, but follow the softly spoken, evasively worded protocols of international air safety investigations.
On 4 November 2007 a Thai International 777 crew untrained in a procedure called a non-directional beacon approach, nearly flew their jet into the ground north of Melbourne Airport.
On 9 May 2008 a Garuda crew disregarded the Perth control tower, first pulling away from an attempt to land on a part of a runway closed for repairs, then came back, nearly landed on the same spot, and then landed further down the runway.
It was described at the time as one of the most gratuitously ignorant and stupid things any airline had been seen to do at an Australian airport.
These incidents, and their interim reports were given prominence in Crikey at the time as linked above, but compare them to the final reports for Melbourne and Perth here.
The ATSB interim reports nailed the bad flying in damning detail.
But the final reports are, as usual, from a public point of view, total cop outs. Under the rules, they can’t be anything else.
In the case of the Thai International near crash, the ATSB says:
The aircraft operator had known about the difficulties in flying approaches without constant angle approach paths and was in the process of training flight crews on procedures specific to NDB approaches when the incident occurred. In October 2007, the operator introduced a training program to instruct pilots on a new method to conduct those approaches. At the time of the incident, the pilots of the 777 had not undergone that training.
The real story is that Thai should never had been allowed to send jets with incompletely trained pilots into Melbourne at the controls of a large jet.
In its Garuda screws up at Perth final report, the ATSB seeks to shift the remedial action to the airport, not to two pilots who were inadequate for the task of receiving and acting on instructions that dozens of other pilots from all around the world had no difficulty in following.
On the second approach, the flight crew were again issued the landing clearance ‘… runway 21, displaced threshold, cleared to land’. The aerodrome controller recalled observing the aircraft on what appeared to be an approach to land on the closed section of the runway and instructed the flight crew to go around. The go-around instruction also included information to assist the flight crew in identifying where the aircraft was to be landed. That additional information, together with the high workload being experienced by the flight crew at that time, may have momentarily confused them, with the effect that they did not assimilate and act on the instruction to go around.
Since when is this an excuse for poor airmanship? The answer is of course, anything is excusable when Australian airlines need to pass through Indonesian air space to get to Europe and much of Asia, and we must not offend our friends in Jakarta.
Since the Perth incident Garuda also managed to stuff up an approach to Darwin last December. The details of that suggest the carrier is as dangerous as ever.
This reminds of an incident back in the time before there was an approach radar in Cairns. A friend of mine who worked for Airservices at the time told me about it (late 80s?). An Asian airline (Thai, I think) B747 was approaching Cairns from the north west, early morning. It was to do an NDB approach but somehow the crew put the aircraft on the wrong bearing for the descent. When it popped up near Cairns, the ATC guys turned white. The B747 had flown in cloud down a mountain valley where it was below min safety height for a lot of the time. Pure luck it didn’t clip a wing on the valley wall. According to my friend, this incident was never made public but a capable approach radar was installed at Cairns not long after!
Alex
Bakerboy,
It was a Thai A310 doing a step descent. The Cairns radar has been installed and was being tested that day when those fine tuning it picked up the jet in a dangerous position and managed to pass a message via the tower alerting the crew to their true position. It was a close call. It was subsequently determined the descent had started one step too soon, and the clearance from a rocky gorge was only around 300 feet. I wrote it up as a ‘scoop’ in The Bulletin and the incident happened in the early 90s, however I don’t have the story on a digital database and cannot check whether or not it came before or after a Thai A310 captain became confused after making a missed approach to Kathmandu and while diverting to New Delhi mistakenly flew at full speed into a cliff at somewhere around 12,000 feet altitude from memory. In yet another extraordinary coincidence, that jet crashed at a spot not far from the cave where Australian trekker James Scott had been sheltering and rescued weeks earlier after being lost and famously surviving for weeks on chocolate bars.