[Peetwo]

LCC & the inevitable (or not) big bang??

Via the other Aunty's Triple J hack... :

The cost of budget: Is it safe to fly cheap?

Posted Mon 26 Jun 2017, 7:43pm
Updated Mon 26 Jun 2017, 8:01pm

It all works perfectly until it doesn't. Everything is fine until it's not. Plane flights are routine until the cabins starts shaking like a washing machine. That's when you start to pay attention.

The captain comes on: "Our survival depends on you cooperating".

On Sunday, passengers on board an AirAsia X flight from Perth to Kuala Lumpur heard a loud bang and then felt the plane begin to shudder. It shuddered all the way back to Perth - one-and-a-half hours. According to some, the captain urged passengers to "say a prayer".


Damos Stevens said the flight was 'nerve-wracking'.

They got home safely, many of them exhausted from shock, and walked out past passengers lining up to get on other scheduled Air Asia flights. The terror of the experience didn't seem to be contagious. At least one passenger of another flight on the same airline thought their misfortune actually made his flight safer: the chances of it happening again so quickly would be rare.

That's not quite logical (it would make sense to more concerned about your flight), but then what is logical about our risk assessment of cheap travel?

Can we really expect tickets to be so cheap, and get cheaper, and flying to remain safe?
The bigger question: are we ignoring the real cost of flying budget?

The stats show flying is safer than ever, yet aviation experts have been warning for years of declining maintenance standards, as carriers look to cut costs.

They point to a series of near misses and say a major crash is inevitable.

Everything is fine until it's not. That's the lesson of Professor Michael Quinlan at UNSW's School of Management - a lead investigator into the Beaconsfield mine collapse.

"Normally with these things it takes about three disasters before any action happens," he told Hack.

"This will happen with aviation outsourcing and maintenance."

"When a number of planes drop out of sky - that action will happen."

"What we're getting is near misses."

What do the stats show?

Air travel has become cheaper and safer. The rate of accidents has been falling since about 1980, and continued to fall even as low-cost airlines took off. Despite terrorism or MH370-type mysteries, going by air is safer than going by bus.

According to the International Air Transport Association's 2009 data, a person could fly every day for 3,859 years without being involved in an accident.

There's also no clear relationship between ticket price and safety. The safest airlines tend to be the more expensive carriers, but many low-cost airlines have excellent safety records.

A few airlines tend to pop up across all the safety rankings: Qantas, Air New Zealand, Cathay Pacific, Emirates, Etihad, EVA Air, KLM, Japan Airlines, Lufthansa.

Germany's Jet Airliner Crash Data Evaluation Centre (JACDEC) recently published a list of the world's safest airlines. Some low-cost airlines did better than some 'legacy' national carriers: EasyJet was 28th, AirAsia was 29th, RyanAir was 34th. Air France was 42nd.

There are also lots of carriers with bad safety records, including many that have been banned from Europe. It's a good idea to keep an eye on these. They include about 60 carriers from Indonesia as well as many from Angola, Congo, Gabon, Nepal and Sudan. The issue here isn't low-cost airlines versus 'legacy' national carriers - it's the competency of the national regulator.

For example, our Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) is unlikely to approve a Gira Globo Angolan airlines route from Luanda to Perth.

ATSB has five ongoing investigations of incidents involving AirAsia (including the one from Sunday), which may sound like a lot, and has been widely reported, but it also has four ongoing investigations of incidents involving Qantas (and several more involving QantasLink).

So what's the problem?

Fewer crashes doesn't necessarily mean safety standards have improved - it could mean the planes are just getting better and more reliable.

This issue was raised in a 2015 report on the trend of Australian airlines outsourcing their maintenance overseas. Over the last decade, Australian carriers have had to cut costs to compete with the arrival of foreign carriers, including the Malaysia-based AirAsia. Chances are your next flight will be on a plane that's been serviced in Singapore, the Philippines or Hong Kong.

The report's authors included Professor Quinlan as well as Sarah Gregson, also with UNSW's business school, who told Hack there was a degree of crash-fatalism among the Australian aircraft maintenance engineers she surveyed in 2012-13.

"Quite a few said phrases like 'when the big one happens'," she said.

"'When one hits the deck'."

They think it's only a matter of time."

Dr Gregson said there was a significant recurring theme of concern that safety was being compromised in order to cut costs.

One worker wrote:

"The safety of Australian airlines is being driven by accountants with no idea of aviation safety".

Another said:

"The only way the accountants begin to start training and spending money back on the frontline is when one hits the deck. Let's hope none of us sign out that one."

An engineer wrote:

"If the public and the government are willing to accept $70 one way fares on a $3 million aircraft then they must also accept that aircraft maintenance will be done on a similar cost structure."

'There are worrying trends'

In the past, industry executives have dismissed these kinds of concerns as "playing the safety card as a tool of industrial relations". As they point out, outsourcing maintenance hasn't changed the most important stat: the rate of accidents keeps going down.

But the problem with this, as Professor Quinlan points out, is that a single aviation accident can cost hundreds of lives. It only needs to go wrong once.

The AirAsia plane that crashed into the Java Sea in 2014, killing all on board, made 78 trips between Perth and Bali with a mechanical fault in the 12 months leading up to the tragedy.

Steven Re, trustee of the Australian Licensed Aircraft Engineers Association, a union representing aircraft maintenance engineers, told Hack "there's a limit to how far you can reduce airfares until you start eating into the safety barrier.

" You get what you pay for."

Sarah Gregson said the outsourcing of maintenance had made it hard for the Australian regulator to ensure a minimum standard. It had shifted the burden of regulatory oversight from the regulator to the airline, which also wants to save money.

"Because of national borders we don't necessarily have the regulatory oversight to look and tell what goes on in some operations," Dr Gregson said.

"No doubt the production quality of planes has improved - but there's an overconfidence there'll never be mechanical failures in planes with such high quality."

"There are worrying trends."

We don't know if these broader concerns relate to the Air Asia X flight, because we don't know what went wrong, or the chain of events that led up to what went wrong. It could be a maintenance issue, or pilot error, or freak accident. The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) has begun investigating and will report back within "several months".

Whatever the outcome, it would be a mistake to focus on one airline, as the trends of cost-cutting happen across the whole industry.

AirAsia X said it was investigating the cause "together with our engine manufacturer Rolls-Royce" and was cooperating with aviation authorities.

"We would like to stress that AirAsia Group has always strictly followed the maintenance programme prescribed by our manufacturers," the company said.

"We have also complied with all regulations and requirements as set forth by every country where the airline operates, including Australia."

The ATSB has the power to make a recommendation to CASA, which enforces the regulations and decides which airlines can operate in Australia. A CASA spokesman said there was no correlation between lower safety and lower cost as the same rules applied to all carriers.

Professor Quinlan said if the Sunday incident is traced back to a maintenance issue, it should trigger a rigorous audit from CASA.

"It's just a matter of time until planes fall out of the sky," he said.

MTF...P2