Australia’s Transport Workers’ Union (TWU) has called on the Australian government to ban all AirAsia Indonesia flights in and out of the country, pending a safety audit after information was leaked from a preliminary report concerning the investigation into the December 28 crash of AirAsia Flight QZ8501.
In a statement released on February 3, TWU national secretary Tony Sheldon said he had written to the Minister for Infrastructure and Deputy Prime Minister, Warren Truss, demanding that the Civil Aviation Safety Authority carry out an audit into the airline’s staff training, aircraft maintenance and industrial relations conditions.
The union, which represents more than 90,000 transport workers, claimed that the information leaked from the initial findings raised questions about the airline’s pilot training and revealed that the pilots took off without an assessment of the weather conditions. The statement claimed that AirAsia obtained a weather report almost an hour and a half after the airplane departed from Surabaya, Indonesia’s second-biggest city.
“We need to ensure that a rapidly expanding airline like AirAsia Indonesia is not cutting corners to suit a low standard model,” said Sheldon. "We also want to see greater transparency and do not want to have to wait several months before an official report from Indonesia is made public.”
Limited Data Released
So far the National Transportation Safety Committee (KNKT) of Indonesia has yet to release the full details of the preliminary report, which it submitted to the International Civil Aviation Organization on January 28. Rather, the KNKT disclosed 18 points of factual information from the report, much of it based on FDR and CVR data.
Among the points revealed included the presence of cumulus-nimbus clouds as high as 44,000 feet at the time of the accident. The KNKT also confirmed that the copilot, a French national named Remi Emmanuel Plesel, was in control of the aircraft before it crashed.
The KNKT has announced that it will publish a final report of the accident in seven to eight months. In the meantime, the body plans to establish a working committee to address aviation safety, security and quality assurance. The KNKT also announced that the role of the Indonesian domestic slot coordinator, which was originally managed by multiple parties, will now be operated by a single party and that an airline safety rating will take effect and get published every three months.
To date, searchers have recovered the remains of 92 of the 162 occupants of the ill-fated AirAsia Airbus A320.