Newsmakers
Airlines rush to implement two person cockpit rule
April 1st 2015
At press time, Australia had quickly followed New Zealand and Canada in revising standard operating procedures for Australian registered commercial aircraft. Read More » With immediate effect, there must be two people in the cockpit of a commercial aircraft at all times during a flight. If either the captain or the co-pilot leave the flight deck, a flight attendant must stand in for the absent cockpit crew member. Several other airlines in the region, including Cathay Pacific Airways and Dragonair, have had this requirement in place for a long period, as have U.S. carriers.
Air New Zealand revised cockpit procedures within 24 hours of the Germanwings 9525 accident, which killed all 150 passengers and crew when it crashed in the French Alps on March 24. It is alleged the 27-year-old co-pilot, Andreas Lubitz, deliberately steered the plane into a French mountainside.
Ironically, the tragic accident happened a few weeks after the International Air Transport Association (IATA) said that statistically 2014 was the safest year on record for air transport, as measured in hull losses per one million flights. The industry had an accident rate of one hull loss for every 4.4 million flights last year, compared with one accident for every 2.4 million flights a year earlier.
The Asia-Pacific accident rate fell from 0.63 to 0.44 and North Asia from 0.06 to zero. However, the number of fatalities did increase in 2014 mainly because of the heavy loss of life from the two Malaysia Airlines accidents and the crash of an Indonesia AirAsia jet on December 28 last year.
IATA said there were 12 fatal accidents involving 641 fatalities last year, compared with an average of 19 fatal accidents and the loss of 517 lives annually for the five years from 2009.
The destruction of Malaysia Airlines MH17 by anti-aircraft fire on July 8, 2014, is not included as an accident in the globally recognized accident classification criteria.
