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AIR SAFETY WEEK September 18, 2000 Cargo Pilots Call for Parity on Safety Regulation, Enforcement and Practices The fastest growing sector in the aviation industry lags in safety, according to sentiments expressed by pilots at a recent air cargo symposium. "The accident record of the past five years, given our numbers, is disconcerting," observed Capt. Tom Rachford, a DC-8F pilot with Emery Worldwide and chairman of the union's master executive council. There have been 9 cargo plane accidents, compared to ten for the passenger-carrying sector. Improvements in safety should accompany the projected 50 percent growth of the cargo fleet by 2019, according to the cargo pilots at the Sept. 6-7 safety symposium. They believe the air freight industry lags the passenger-carrying sector: Hazardous material. According to Rep. James Oberstar (D, Minn.), ranking minority member of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives, cargo-only aircraft reported some 1,100 hazardous material (HAZMAT) incidents in 1998, compared to only 50 for passenger aircraft. "Cargo aircraft had 15 times the incidents per revenue ton-miles," Oberstar declared. Jim Hall, chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), argued that the tracking of HAZMAT remains inadequate: "Efforts like those of FedEx to track the HAZMAT on board its aircraft have not been widespread within the air cargo industry." Collision avoidance. According to Hall, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is expected to issue a Notice of Proposed Rule Making (NPRM) in the next few weeks requiring the installation of collision avoidance technology on cargo planes. This initiative places the FAA in the role of following the U.S. Congress, which passed a law requiring all transport-category aircraft, including freighters, to have traffic alerting and collision avoidance (TCAS) or equivalent technology installed by 2002. By virtue of its purchase of B767's already equipped with TCAS, Airborne Express [ABF] is one of the leading cargo operators to deploy the technology. Capt. Rob Boyd, president of the Airborne pilots' union, said, "I flew for 22 years without TCAS." Then, on his first flight with TCAS into Long Beach, Calif., he exclaimed, "I just couldn't believe the number of aircraft that were airborne...normally concealed by the haze." Boyd pointed out that India passed a law last December requiring TCAS on all large aircraft operating into the country. That mandate was the direct result of a tragic 1996 midair collision between a Saudi Arabian Airlines B747 and an Air Khazakhstan Il-76, killing all 349 aboard. Fatigue. Michael Weiland, president of the Federal Express [FDX] Pilots Association, cited the case of two flights, one cargo, one passenger, in the same aircraft model, from Seattle, Wash., to Memphis, Tenn. "The cargo pilots are not guaranteed pre-departure crew rest; they're guaranteed post-departure crew rest," he said. Chairman Hall told the pilots something they knew already: "Your workday usually begins as everyone else's is ending and, we've learned over the years, inverted work schedules can contribute to fatigue-related accidents and incidents." Hall expressed his conviction that the FAA needs to resolve the overall issue of hours of service and to equalize duty and rest requirements across the industry. Disparate treatment. The cargo pilots also believe that if airfreight companies are going to be flying fixed schedules as rigorous as their passenger counterparts, the same rules should apply. For example, FedEx, UPS, and Airborne all fly in strictly-scheduled environments, yet FedEx and Airborne operate under Supplemental air carrier regulations, while UPS operates under more stringent Domestic rules (e.g., UPS must have a flight dispatcher and is subject to the 'lookback' rule for required pilot rest). The disparities prompted the cargo pilots to cap their two-day safety seminar with a call for a single safety standard. "We want to make a statement," Weiland said, "that the FAA and the Congress require one level of safety in our skies, unrelated to what we carry behind the cockpit door." Be it Resolved...One Level of Safety Washington, DC (Sept. 7, 2000) The attendees of the Air Cargo Symposium 2000, representing over 79,000 pilots in both passenger and cargo airlines, today resolved that all major U.S. carrier pilots commit to and insist on one level of safety. The resolution would apply a single level of safety to crew rest, fatigue, and all safety issues for all pilots flying under (Part) 121, 135, domestic, supplemental, flag, or international rules. Pilot fatigue is a scientifically substantiated problem industry wide which, according to the pilot group, is inadequately addressed and recognized under current regulation. |