December 2010 Archives

One highly desirable commodity that the airline industry has never been able to market is safety.

Even an airline that was confident of its safety performance didn't dare brag about it. To talk about safety was to imply that flying was inherently dangerous, and since many passengers are naturally nervous about getting airborne, airline marketing messages concentrated on comfort and reliability.

IATA may now be changing all that in a subtle way.

Good old IATA. It's always been there, and its member airlines knew what it was for, but the travelling public, by and large, did not - and still do not. 

In fact until the gradual process of market liberalisation began in the 1980s, IATA was vilified by the Western press and many politicians as nothing more than a cartel.

But in recent years it has become more than a lobbyist on behalf of the industry. It has taken upon itself the task of policing standards among its member airlines, and throwing them out if they don't - or can't - perform to specification.

Safety has been the starting point, with the introduction of the compulsory biennial IATA Operational Safety Audit (IOSA). Airlines which failed it - not a high percentage of the total membership - were ejected.

IATA member airlines always had a lower accident rate than the world average, but this year, as the IOSA programme's benefits start to kick in, that difference is getting dramatic. In 2010 to 30 November, the world jet accident rate was 0.66 hull losses per million departures, but for IATA carriers it was 0.28 - more than twice as good.

Incidentally, 0.66 hull losses per million departures is very safe in historical terms, so the IATA standard is high indeed.

Some airlines used to put the IATA logo on their aircraft near the boarding door, but many have stopped because passengers don't know what it signifies.

But if it comes to be seen as the stamp of quality, conferring passenger confidence that safety is as good as it can realistically be, maybe members will start painting it onto their aeroplanes again.

I got a call from Rolls-Royce today, which woke me up. The last one was about five years ago. It was Peter Morgan, the engine manufacturer's director of corporate affairs.

Perhaps, I hoped, he was finally going to give me some information relevant to the ongoing inquiry into the Qantas QF32 accident - the one in which the No 2 Trent 900 engine on one of its A380s suffered uncontained failure, severely damaging the airframe and aircraft systems.

No such luck. Mr Morgan wanted to persuade me to withdraw information published in Flight International and on Flightglobal, on the grounds that it was misleading.

We had reported that the fault which caused the engine failure only affected the earlier Trent 900 versions, the A and B variants, but not the C. Morgan said that implied that Rolls knew about the weakness, and had eliminated it in the C version. But, he told me: "It is not true that we knew about a problem in the A and B versions of the engine and went on to correct it in the C version. There has been no design change relevant to this failure between A, B and C versions of the engine."

So, I asked him, is the C vulnerable to the same failure as the A and B? No, he said, the C is not vulnerable to that failure.

I asked what the difference was between the two. What had Rolls introduced which rendered the C resistant to a QF32-type failure? Morgan consulted his colleagues at Rolls and decided not to comment.

I had a pretty frank - but scrupulously polite - exchange of views with Morgan.

Why will Rolls never answer reasonable questions? They have always been the same (and for me, always is many years). And I am not alone among my colleagues in finding Rolls a closed book.

Why will Rolls not provide information about what they are doing to rectify the QF32 problem in the Trent 900 series? They think it is enough to inform us that they are doing something, but they will not discuss what it is. They discuss it with their "clients", the airlines and the airframe manufacturer, but not elsewhere.

So it's a case of "Not in front of the children", apparently.

I put it to Morgan that Rolls' ultimate clients are the fare paying passengers who are, right now, trying to make an intelligent decision about whether to ask Qantas, or Singapore Airlines, or Lufthansa to put them on one of the Boeing 747 departures instead of an A380.

The gibe did not work.

But the passengers have nothing to worry about, he told me, adding that proof of the market's confidence is that Rolls-Royce shares have climbed back to the price they had before QF32.

So that's alright, then.

PS: Morgan has just rung me to say that, if he said that the C version was not vulnerable to the QF32 fault like the A and B versions are, he should not have done.

The Rolls-Royce message remains clear: providing information is dangerous, so don't do it.