Safety watchdog blasts Transport Canada
Department has failed to act on recommendations dating back decades, board says
OTTAWA— More than a decade after an Air France jet slid off a wet runway at Pearson International Airport to a fiery crash in a ravine, Transport Canada has yet to adopt international safety standards to help prevent such accidents, a federal watchdog says.
The call for runway-end safety areas is among 52 recommendations involving marine, rail and air sectors — some dating back two decades — that Transport Canada has failed to act on, the Transportation Safety Board of Canada (TSB) said.
“We realize that some of these are tough issues that can take time to resolve, but a decade? Two decades?” TSB chair Kathy Fox told a news conference in Ottawa Monday.
“There is no reasonable excuse for taking that long,” she said.
The safety board released its watch list of the most pressing safety issues in the transportation sector.
And Transport Canada itself, the federal regulator, made the list because of its failure to act on dozens of safety recommendations.
“Most of the time, Transport Canada agrees that the issues we point out need to be resolved. And they even promise to take action,” Fox said. “Despite these good intentions, however, the department doesn’t always deliver.
“Some of the risk(s) that we’ve identified for many years still persist in the system. They haven’t been fully addressed,” she said.
She cited the call for improved pilot training, decision-making and crew resource management as one recommendation from the 1990s that has not been implemented.
Yet, she said pilot decision-making remains a factor in “many, many aviation occurrences.”
Failure to act on another recommendation around cockpit voice recorders, to ensure they can record data for longer periods, has left Canada falling short of U.S. and global standards, she said.
The TSB is pressing Transport Canada to make a “clear commitment” to take action on outstanding recommendations.
On Monday, federal Transport Minister Marc Garneau said the department was working on all the recommendations, but said that some take time because of their complexity.
“It’s not just a question of Transport Canada making a decision. There has to be a lot of consultation with the private sector, whether we’re talking about rail, aircraft, ships,” Garneau said.
But the TSB isn’t waiting for Transport Canada to act.
Fox revealed that the board intends to take the initiative in raising safety issues with stakeholders and transport operators.
“We’re calling on industry leaders and government to up their game,” she said.
One of their first stops will be the Greater Toronto Airports Authority, operator of Pearson International Airport. She wants to hear what measures the airport has taken to reduce the risk of an overrun at the end of a runway, where two accidents have already occurred, most recently in 2005.
That’s when the Air France flight landed during a violent thunderstorm. Going too fast, it ran off the rain-slicked runway and into the ravine, where it broke apart and burst into flames.
All 297 passengers and 12 crew survived the accident, but several dozen were taken to hospital.
International standards call for a 150-metre safety area beyond the end of a runway — a standard that Canada does not meet, Fox said.
Recommended practice, as is implemented at major airports in the U.S., is a 300-metre safety area, meant to provide a run-off zone if an aircraft isn’t able to stop on the runway.
The airport authority said Monday that since that accident, it has taken steps to create safety areas at the end of all runways at Pearson that comply with international standards.
“This was achieved by a variety of methods, including physical construction works, the reduction of declared runway distances,” spokesperson Hillary Marshall said in an email.
Transport Canada did get credit for its action to reduce the number of railway-crossing accidents, an improvement that caused the issue to be dropped from this year’s watch list.