A Rule That Could Have Saved Eight Lives
Sydney Morning Herald
Monday December 24, 2001
The partners of two men killed in the Whyalla plane crash are horrified they may have died senselessly because the national aircraft safety body failed to act for 14 months on a crucial recommendation to put life jackets on small aircraft.
The Civil Aviation Safety Authority has launched an internal investigation into why progress on the life jacket rule - for aircraft with fewer than nine passengers - stalled in a bureaucratic maze until last Friday, when a discussion paper was released.
Eight people died on May 31 last year when a Whyalla Airlines Piper Chieftain lost both engines due to mechanical failure and ditched in Spencer Gulf, 26 kilometres from Whyalla.
Two bodies were found in the water outside the plane, one was never retrieved and five others, including those of Sydney union organiser Neil Marshall, 56, and Adelaide lawyer Richard Deegan, 44, were found inside the aircraft after a five-day search.
Mr Deegan's widow, Kathy Deegan, said she was angry at the inaction on the life jacket recommendation, made to CASA on October 20 last year.
The post-mortem examination of Mr Deegan father of two teenage boys found he drowned but recorded no injuries from the crash impact, apart from neck whiplash.
``We're really upset nothing's been done," she said.
``My husband might have survived with a life jacket and we don't want eight people to have died for nothing."
Linda Carruthers, the partner of Mr Marshall, a national organiser with the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union, said the implementation delay was unacceptable. ``How long does it take?" she said.
Five months after the crash, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau recommended to CASA that it change regulations so small aircraft flying over water would have to carry life jackets.
There are currently no Australian laws that compel aircraft with fewer than nine passengers to do so.
CASA took six months to reply to the safety bureau, reporting on March 22 this year that it was ``in the process of amending civil aviation order 20.11 to comply".
The necessary regulation needed for stricter safety measures has still not been gazetted.
But two discussion papers on life jackets and shoulder harnesses another safety bureau recommendation from July 1998 were released last week.
It is expected the life jacket ruling will apply from early next year and shoulder harnesses, costing $2million to install in 800 small aircraft, will be mandated from late next year.
A spokesman for CASA, Peter Gibson, said the life jacket recommendation delay resulted from the ``consultation processes that government agencies are required to go through".
However, CASA insiders admit that the authority's director, Mick Toller, had previously ordered the bureaucratic process speeded up and launched an internal investigation last week when the delay was discovered.
Ms Carruthers accused CASA of being more concerned with industry reaction than the safety of small aircraft.
``I'm really sick and tired of this notion of affordable safety," she said.
``These planes can be ditched successfully and people survive."
In 13 ditchings overseas of Piper Navajos or Chieftains between 1984 and this year, the transport safety bureau found that 45 people survived and there were only two deaths, one of those being an occupant who had a heart attack.
The bureau's report into the Whyalla crash could not determine if the occupants were conscious after the accident but said it was ``likely" their chances of survival would have been greater had they been wearing life jackets.
© 2001 Sydney Morning Herald
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