Changing the way aircraft are designed to save lives by limiting fires after plane crashes wouldn't be simple, nor would it be the most effective way to reduce aviation fatalities, a senior official with Transport Canada says.
Martin Eley was responding to a scathing report from the Transportation Safety Board that argued two pilots might still be alive if the federal government heeded recommendations that date back seven years.
The safety board's report last week probed an October 2011 crash in Richmond in which two pilots were killed and seven passengers were seriously injured when a turboprop plane slammed into a road while preparing for an emergency landing at Vancouver International Airport.
The board's report concluded the pilots could have survived the crash, but instead, a cockpit fire fuelled by arcing wires connected to the plane's battery left them with fatal burns. An investigator told a news conference that Transport Canada has repeatedly ignored recommendations first issued in 2006 to prevent or reduce the severity of post-crash fires, including introducing technology to disconnect aircraft batteries upon impact.
Eley, Transport Canada's director general of civil aviation, said it would take significant research to evaluate whether such changes would even work, as well as the cooperation of foreign regulators.
He said Transport Canada, as well the U.S.-based Federal Aviation Administration and regulators in Europe, have instead focused their resources on preventing crashes in the first place, identifying the issues most associated with fatal crashes and concentrating on those. For example, Eley said half of all aviation fatalities are linked to either the pilots' loss of aircraft control, controlled flight into terrain, or poor response to engine failure.
"Those areas contribute to the largest number of accidents, so the decision was made to focus on those things, which are clearly all about avoiding accidents, in preference to focusing on a particular piece that is not going to create the same impact in terms of the overall fatality numbers," Eley said in an interview.
Eley said it would be difficult for Canada to unilaterally introduce new standards that differ from design specifications elsewhere in the world, and he argued that widespread change would be extremely slow, given that many aircraft remain in operation for decades before they are replaced.
The accident near Vancouver's airport involved a Beechcraft King Air twin-engined plane operated by Northern Thunderbird Air. It left the airport on Oct. 27, 2011, but turned around after the pilots noticed an oil leak about 15 minutes into the flight.
The safety board concluded a series of problems and mistakes contributed to the crash, beginning when maintenance crews failed to properly secure an engine oil cap and ending when the pilot applied power to only one propeller immediately before the crash.
Six of the seven surviving passengers filed a lawsuit earlier this year against Northern Thunderbird Air, alleging the airline and the pilots were negligent.
One of the passengers' lawyers, J.J. Camp, said that while most of his clients weren't burned by the subsequent fire, it "heightened the stress and the emotional scars" they were left with.
Camp, whose firm has a long history overseeing cases involving aviation crashes, said the TSB's recommendations on post-impact fires should be a no-brainer for Transport Canada.
"If there are ways and means to prevent (fire-related fatalities) or at least contribute to preventing that, then those need to be found," said Camp.
"What the TSB did in 2006 was make what we in the air-crash industry believe were reasonable and sensible recommendations."
Click here to see more from The Province.
