Details Disclosed of In-Flight Parts Shedding

Air Safety Week, Oct 28, 2002

There may be no faster way for an airline to lose its safety reputation than for its airplanes to have parts fall into parking lots, or to land with fewer parts than when its planes took off.

The only thing worse is an accident. Most incidents tend to be reported and quickly fade from public view. Accident investigations can take years, with each development or revelation fanning the fading embers of public interest.

However, embarrassing incidents are a close second in the anthology of potential nightmares for airline executives.

Such is the case with Air New Zealand (ANZ). If problems come in groups of three, the carrier just experienced that trinity of trouble:

* On Aug. 24, an upper wing inspection panel blew off an ANZ B747-400 and fell into a parking lot at Manukau, near Auckland, just 800 yards from a local police station. The police called the airline; the airline called the pilots, who looked out the window and confirmed the panel was missing, and the airplane discontinued its planned flight to Narita, Japan, and returned to Auckland.

* On Aug. 30, an ANZ B747-400 lost a right hand, trailing edge, inner fore-flap. A local fisherman found the part in Manukau Harbor, near the departure airport, at about the same time the crew was preparing to land in Los Angeles and could not get the flaps to move to the desired setting. Another part missing from the assembly washed up on the beach about two weeks later.

* On Sept. 25 the same aircraft that was involved in the Aug. 30 incident experienced a noisy engine failure (thrown blade in the high pressure section) about 90 minutes out of London's Heathrow airport on a flight back to New Zealand. The 358 passengers were startled by three loud bangs, and the crew had to dump fuel before aborting the flight and returning to Heathrow on three engines.

To be sure, these were three unrelated events. In the first, an airplane was put back into service with maintenance work still to be done and the panel held temporarily in place by just four screws, about three percent of the 125 needed for complete installation. The failure to install the full battery of screws in the inspection panel was serious, but not fatal - only because of the surface involved. All 14 passengers and crew were killed in the 1991 crash of a Continental Express Airlines EMB-120 twin-turboprop. The horizontal stabilizer separated in flight. Maintenance personnel had failed to install any of the 47 screws needed to affix the leading edge of the stabilizer.

The second ANZ incident was similar to broken fore flap fastening lugs in other carriers, possibly involving metal fatigue, although apparently no manufacturer's bulletin or airworthiness directive had been issued. The third incident involved a powerplant, not the airframe. Still, the pattern was the subject of much comment in the New Zealand media. The same airplane involved in two of these three recent incidents also had made a precautionary landing last year at Fiji due to engine trouble ("Jinx Dogs ANZ Jet" read one headline). And, in May 2001 an ANZ B767 lost a baseball bat-size piece of its wing, which plunged through the roof of a south Auckland warehouse.

The carrier has suffered jibes from local politicians. With parts having fallen onto Manukau City twice in just over a year, councilman Bob Wichman publicly suggested that the residents wear hard hats.

What may be instructive, and surely positive, is the carrier's reaction to these recent incidents. On Sept. 11 two lengthy statements were distributed to recipients across the globe. One statement dealt with the Aug. 24 panel detachment; the other addressed the flap attachment lug that broke Aug. 30. Each statement set out details of the incidents, the internal company reviews of these events, the actions of regulatory and accident investigation authorities, and the immediate corrective actions under way at the airline.

The statements stood out in the office of this publication as unusual in their candor. Hundreds of press releases, announcements, and whatnot are received by facsimile and e-mail daily, but it is rare to receive a detailed confessional from a carrier about an incident, especially one that points a tentative finger at maintenance mismanagement. Additionally, now-defunct carrier Ansett was grounded twice by Australia's Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) for maintenance non-compliance only six to eight months prior to that airline's Sept. 13, 2001, collapse. ANZ owned a controlling interest in Ansett, and some sources suggest that the growing maintenance deficiencies at Ansett may reflect a pattern at ANZ.

Many airlines, suffering a barrage of such criticism after an accident or incident, would choose to remain silent, on the grounds that the less said, the lower the possibility for further embarrassment or liability.

ANZ took a different approach, opting for more openness. The question was posed to ANZ, how and why was this decision to disclose made? The response by Cameron Hill, an ANZ spokesman, provides insight into the thinking at the carrier. Indeed, the candor of his remarks seems to reinforce the doctrine of disclosure: