Criminalization of Operators in Aircraft Accidents (Essay Sample)

Criminalization of Operators in Aircraft Accidents
Student’s Name
Institutional AffiliationCriminalization of Operators in Aircraft Accidents
Abstract
The most important issue in air transportation is safety. Chicago Convention of 1944, Article 44 describes the overall aim of International Civil Aviation Organization as ensuring orderly and safe growth of civil aviation internationally. Safety is a complicated activity that involves all fields in aviation. Accidents are attributed to undesirable chain of events and to prevent them, an effective investigation system is required. Safety investigation addresses the need to prevent more accidents by learning from the occurring incidents and accidents and taking remedial actions for future.
There is a massive growth in the aviation industry. This paper aims at investigating if criminalization of accidents in the air transport industry is a threat to the safety of aviation. Does it help in preventing more accidents or is it just a waste of time? It is possible to achieve a just culture in aviation internationally.
This paper considers the results of the France Concorde accident that happened in 2000. It analyses the case and the investigation that followed to conclude whether criminalization of aircraft accidents is just, and does it help in preventing further accidents.
Introduction
The case of Air France Concorde is a perfect example of a just culture test. It crashed in 2000 immediately after take off. The investigation revealed that the crash had been caused by a piece of metal dropped by another flight (DC-10) onto the runway (Bureau d'Enquetes et d'Analyses, 2000). This caused a lot of chaos that led to the closure of Concorde jets in 2003. Blame was pushed to everyone involved in the flight; operators, designers of the plane, the Continental Airline from which the metal strip detached and the mechanic who had fixed the metal strip. The final ruling was that John Taylor, the mechanic responsible for fixing DC-10, had used the wrong metal. Continental Airlines were fined for damages as DC-10 was their aircraft. The two were accused of involuntary manslaughter. This ruling was overturned by a French court in 2012 which acquitted the airline of manslaughter charges and the mechanic of using the wrong metal. It also stated that the ruling on manslaughter was unjustified.
Body
Air France Concorde 2000
Air Franc Concorde was a supersonic aircraft registered F-BTSC and operated by Air France. On the fateful evening of July 25th 2000, the plane crashed in Gonesse commune just after takeoff from the Roissy Charles de Gaulle aerodrome. There were flames seen coming from beneath its left wing and less than two minutes later the only supersonic passenger aircraft crashed in Gonesse suburb. This plane was undertaking a charter flight to New York. There were one hundred passengers and nine crew members of the crew who all perished in the crash together with four persons who were on the ground. Almost immediately after the crash, teams from BEA, the investigative body in France, were dispatched: one to the crash sight and another to Charles Gaulle (Bureau d'Enquetes et d'Analyses, 2000). They coordinated with the air police to carry out initial searches and observations. The following day, the minister of equipment, transport and housing, Jean Claude Gaysott, nominated a commission to help BEA in investigation. The commission directed the investigation which led to the drafting of various reports.
Official investigations focused mostly on the fire. According to BEA, the fire broke out when the plane stepped on a strip of metal on the runway (Bureau d'Enquetes et d'Analyses, 2000). This burst one of the tires and the rubber chunks thudded into the fuel tank making a hole where jet fuel poured through, causing the ignition. Hot gases produced caused the engines to falter and even though the captain of the jet, Captain Christian Marty, struggled valiantly, the crash was inevitable due to loss of thrust. Captain Marty was a dare devil who once crossed the Atlantic ocean on a wind surf. Some experts however, say that even though the fire damaged the second engine it was survivable since the fire would have burned out in few minutes. They continue to say that this accident was avoidable if it were not for a chain of mistakes that nobody talks about to date.
It is believed that the plane went down not entirely because of the fire but also it was flying too slowly and was overweight. In addition the plane was beyond its limit of centre of gravity, and two of its engines was erroneously shut down or damaged. The plane was flying slowly as the captain had pulled the plane into the air in an attempt to avoid skidding off the runway and colliding with an oncoming plane. Why the plane was skidding is still a subject of concern but it is associated with a landing gear that was improperly repaired.
Normally, the captain still had enough speed to safely climb away, but he did not have enough power. One engine was destroyed by foreign material; pieces of an exploded tire and debris from a runway edge light that the jet had skidded on. The second engine was completely shut down by the flight engineer at the wrong altitude and time (Islet, 2012). This is because the thrust from that engine was needed for survival. All this time the plane was estimated to weigh six tons more than its maximum allowable level depending on the winds. If the plane was carrying the proper weight, it could have been airborne immediately it skidded on the piece of metal.
French Court
The official body of technical investigation is known as the BEA. Air accidents in France lead to criminal investigations when a large number of fatalities were experienced (Foreman, 2005). In the last twenty years it has been apparent that criminal investigation overrules technical investigation. In the previous years, investigations by BEA were in close cooperation with the judiciary. This was necessary to avoid misuse of power to the disadvantage of the authority in question (Werfelman, 2008). Technical investigation was assumed to get the facts right while the judiciary used these facts to point out the direction of the investigation.
Following the results of the investigators in the Concorde crash, French Concorde was grounded pending further investigations but was opened in 2001 shortly after installing a safety program worth seventeen million pounds. Two years later French Concorde retired blaming it on the Paris air crash. In 2005, a judge ordered that the Continental Airlines, whose DC-10 plane had dropped the metal strip, be investigated for involuntary man slaughter (Clark, 2012). In 2010, a French court had found the mechanic of the DC-10 plane and the Continental Airlines guilty of man slaughter. The mechanic was termed as responsible for working on the plane that dropped the small metal strip on the runway. Previously, the designers of Concorde and the Air France were being charged of negligence while the operators at DeGaulle were found accountable for failing to inspect the runway. These charges were dropped immediately. According to the ruling, John Taylor was found to have fitted the wrong kind of metal on DC-10.
In a turn of events, in November 2012, an appeal court in France overturned the manslaughter convictions against Continental Airlines. The Versailles court absolved the airline of any criminal doing but upheld the 2010 court order of paying damages worth $1.3 million to Air France as a way of compensating them for the damage they caused to its image. The French court also overturned the ruling on the mechanic, John Taylor, who had been faulted to use titanium rather than soft metals to build replacement wear strip piece for the DC-10 aircraft. He had also been accused of attaching the metal improperly which led to its falling off the Continental Airline to the runway (Clark, 2012). The appeal ruling did not challenge the findings that the metal strip was the start the chain of events that led to the Concorde crash, but insisted that a manslaughter charge was unjust.
Judge Michelle Luga argued that even though the mechanic knew that the metal strip could detach at any time, it was not in his wildest imagination that a simple strip could be the source of such a disaster. The judge said that the Concorde design team had left it vulnerable to shock for more than twenty years (Clark, 2012). Even so, the lower court ruled that the French officials had lacked the opportunity to improve it and could therefore not be accused of a serious misconduct. A lawyer representing the Continental Airlines said that the real cause of the crash was the Concorde fleet which he termed as unfit for flying. The families of the victims however were unhappy with this ruling as it made them feel powerless though they had been compensated years back. The main goal for such investigations is to assign responsibility.
Criminalization of the act
It is a widely known fact that flying is the quickest and safest mode of transportation. According to the National Transportation Safety Board, air transport contributes to 1.4% of the total transport accidents. These accidents are however stipulated to exceed by the year 2031 because of the increase in aircrafts. Maintaining the accidents rate today will probably result into an increase in the global accidents at an average of one per week (Dekker, 2007). This is a simplified projection that does not consider several variables in the industry. There is an increasing concern in aviation as many authorities are taking the trend of initiating criminal prosecutions against the professionals in aviation. Material found in the safety investigation is said to land in different judicial investigations (Abeyratne, 2012). This has instilled fear in aviation professional; as they are concerned that operational decisions coul...