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September 19, 2010 - Aircraft Engineers International (AEI), the international body representing aircraft engineers, is becoming increasingly concerned about the approach being taken by the world's leading aviation regulators towards safety.
Recent events in
the
Unfortunately,
more evidence of safety lapses will be presented to delegates during the
38th AEI Annual Conference to be held in |
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Fred Bruggeman, AEI's Secretary General said that "events in Australia involving CASA, the Australian National Authority, approving foreign maintenance bases to perform safety related maintenance on commercial aircraft despite clear and overwhelming evidence of poor standards are about to reverberate here in Europe."
Engineers at
Australian airline Qantas have highlighted significant safety violations
and low standards of workmanship on Qantas aircraft being maintained by
maintenance facilities outside
"It is clearly
maintenance to a price and not a standard," added Fred Bruggeman, "yet
it gets worse: The maintenance facilities involved are based in AEI has been warning for some time now that EASA is not only failing in its obligation to protect the flying public but is failing to standardize European Aviation regulation. In fact EASA is only fulfilling the prophecy that they would turn out to be nothing more than a paper tiger. |
To date, EASA has been unable or unwilling to tackle wayward European National Authorities and remains completely ineffective when confronted with stubborn national politics. In fact, EASA has now resorted to offering both regulators and industry ways to wriggle out of their safety responsibilities by proposing to introduce "alternative" acceptable means of compliance. This is nothing more than offering airlines the opportunity to "self-regulate". An apt analogy could be governments being permitted to outsource policing responsibilities to criminals. This and many other safety issues will be discussed during congress, where the intention is to set out a road map for action involving all of AEI's 40+ affiliates worldwide. Self-regulation is no success in any industry to which it has been applied, with the recent devastating banking disaster being the latest example in a long line of costly and tragic examples. Government regulatory bodies are set up to protect the public by ensuring standards remain above a minimum level. In aviation this has to a certain extent been achieved. In the past regulators did just that; regulated, and the outcome is a significant improvement in safety levels. Accidents are now rare as a result.
The challenge
facing delegates at this year's congress is how to reverse the current
downhill race to the bottom which is being commercially driven by
industry yet remains unopposed by regulators. If we are not careful all
safety gains made over the past 20 years will be quickly undone as
lowest common standards take a hold. The inevitable outcome will be an
increase in accidents. |
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