Flight International

A special kind of scrutiny was applied to the European Aviation Safety Agency last week.

On 27 September the Royal Aeronautical Society (RAeS) imported five of the top executives from EASA, seated them behind a long desk facing a packed hall of industry people, allowed them a few words each to update the audience on current issues they face, and then opened the session for about two hours of questions.

This doesn't normally happen to the senior executives in European agencies. So why EASA? And why did the agency's big five - executive director Patrick Goudou, communications head Daniel Holtgen, quality and standardisation director Francesco Banal, certification director Norbert Lohl and deputy head of flight standards Eric Sivel - agree to undergo this public grilling?

It's taken a month to remove the damaged Swiss International Air Lines BAE Systems Avro RJ100 from the runway at London City airport after a heavy landing on 18 August.

Weirdly enough British Airways (BA) is yet again on the receiving end of a public dressing down from the UK's regulatory authorities. This time the Air Accidents Investigation Branch is giving them a very hard time indeed over what it found when it dug down into BA's maintenance empire after a medium-embarrassing incident with a 757 back in 2003.

That comes just a few weeks after the AAIB also jumped on an incident when a BA A319 crew shrugged off a mid-air electronics failure with rather more sang froid than the investigators felt was appropriate. And that was distressingly close to another report which also widened its remit from looking at a panel loss on take-off to several other events that the investigators felt were looking alarmingly like a pattern.

Surprise was also expressed in the business (though not unanimously, and mostly in the USA) when a BA crew flew a loaded 747-400 from Los Angeles to the UK after suffering an engine failure shortly after take-off.

Now all this, remember, concerns an airline with a quite superb safety record and which more or less literally wrote the book on some aspects of safety management - notably the BASIS programme which was in large part the driver for the global spread of the flight operations quality assurance (FOQA) concept that is one of the single most important factors in achieving today's extremely high safety rates in the developed world.

So what's going on? Well, there is no doubt that morale in BA's engineering world has taken a thumping over the last few years and people are not happy there. On the other hand, even those who are yelping the loudest are not alleging that safety has been reduced (well, only the occasional voice, and there's always a couple in any airline.)

Here's my view - commercial aviation in the UK is a) practised by some of the finest exponents of the art in the world and b) is more tightly regulated than just about anywhere in the world. In particular, the AAIB boasts some of the wisest heads in the industry or, to put it another way, some canny old dogs who've seen just about everything.

I confess to love reading AAIB reports. The best of them are drafted with a dryness bordering on irony so that you can practically see the author's fractionally raised eyebrow as he listened to an erring pilot's explanation of his, umm, novel way of flying an ILS.

But when the subject is the multi-billion pound corporation that is BA today, the AAIB, in an ever so gentlemanly way, takes its gloves off. And if you're BA then by far the best course of action is to pay attention, say as little as possible in public, and take some very energetic action indeed in private.

I wouldn't have it any other way. And actually I doubt BA would either.

(You can read the whole report on the 757 here.)

It takes a lot to impress British Airways. Losing all your flight instruments at night, for example, hardly merits a mention. Respect!

So, in this story an A319 crew is climbing out of Heathrow on a clear night when suddenly everything goes dark. No flight instruments at all, a standby horizon that it seems almost certainly wasn't illuminated, and just the external horizon to fly by. No radios either.

Unsurprisingly the captain, aged 53, with 11,800 total hours and 4,000 on-type, coped serenely. When the power equally mysteriously returned after a couple of minutes, he spent 40 minutes in the hold fruitlessly investigating the problem and then pressed on to Budapest.

In Hungary, BA's engineers failed to find a fault and cheerfully put the aircraft back into service. The pilots duly filed a mandatory occurrence report and life carried on much as usual.

When the MOR landed at the CAA however the reaction was less relaxed. Not long after it was at the Air Accidents Investigation Branch, and not long after that the aircraft was grounded with Farnborough's finest climbing all over the avionics.

I doubt that my mortal flesh is ever in safer hands than when it's securely inside a BA aircraft, and particularly with a 12,000 hour, silver-templed veteran guiding us through the skies - night or otherwise. But I think there will be some debate over this one.