Senator Gerard Craughwell-- speech from 15 Feb 2022

Thank you very much, indeed, Chair. Captain Cullen, you are welcome. Captain Brereton, you are welcome. Captain Cullen, you are an aviator yourself? Yes, sir. 32 years. I have often heard it said that if we apply the same rules to medicine as we apply to aviation, less people would die on operating theatres and the like. Your track record has been regulated and has been totally and utterly committed to rules and regulations and cross-checking is second to none. That is the first point I want to make today. Captain Brereton, specifically you dealt with the peer support group there a few moments ago. It is no secret that I spent quite a number of years of my life in the trade union business. I would never, ever, ever have advised a member of my union to go to a peer support group that was appointed by management because you are not going to peer support at that stage. So, who is putting the pressure on to maintain a peer support group that is controlled by management? Do you know if you do not? That is quite okay by me, but have you any ideas there? No, it would be speculation on our behalf, but clearly the commercial interests would be dominant and normally hold sway a lot of the time on the interpretation and implementation of EU rules. You are dealing with the Department of Transport for quite a number of years. Who is the aviation expert in the Department? We cannot identify any aviation expert in the Department of Transport. In fact, at every meeting we have with officials from the Department of Transport, they demonstrate their lack of technical expertise with regard to aviation. That is obviously a subjective view. It is not actually a subjective view. It is actually mentioned in the report of the R116 that the Department of Transport lacks technical expertise. It also goes on to say that they cannot be an intelligent customer of aviation services. I am conscious that the Department is here today, so I appreciate it. We are also entitled to hear if the captain and his members are engaging with aviators or with people. We are not engaging with aviators. Please explain in more detail your concerns surrounding the Bureau of Veritas that the Minister referred to in the dial in the Shannon. During the statements following the publication of the R116 accident report, the Minister, both of them, Minister Ryan and Minister Nocton, placed great emphasis on a report by Bureau of Veritas, which they described as an independent review of the IAA national safety oversight regulation. What was astonishing to us is that this was the statements around a search and rescue accident. Yet the scope of the review covered the full range of activities in respect of aircraft operations, but it specifically left out search and rescue. That was the first thing that the report specifically left out search and rescue. The other part of it was that we did not have a copy of the Bureau of Veritas. It had not been published when the Ministers made those statements in the Dahl and the Shannon. But what they left out in page 11 of the Bureau of Veritas report was that under methodology of 4.2, page 11, the scope of the review was to cover the range of activities that fall to the IAA within its role as a national regulator. In view of the travel restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the review was performed remotely. Therefore, this review was not a full audit as it was not able to perform an in-depth examination of the evidence to establish if there were any non-compliance compliances in the execution of the tasks related to the regulations. So effectively it was a desk review? Well, effectively any safety professional reading that would stop right there because this is not a safety document, this is a political document. This was a document generated for the purposes of meeting some political requirement. It certainly does not meet any safety standard. I am aware of my own time here, Captain, so I will be shut up in a few minutes. Lighthouses. Lighthouses are mentioned indeed. There are some peaks mentioned. I think the Skelligs is another one that is mentioned in your charts. The charts are absolutely frightening when you see, I think the Skelligs are 714 metres and they are in the chart at 147 metres, if I am not mistaken. They are 700 feet short of what they should be. That is absolute. Are the Skelligs on a flight path into the country? No, but they would be used. The problem with this is that our members who fly search and rescue helicopters at night will be expecting the Skelligs to be as they are depicted by the IAA. Now, the issue of security, I am sorry, I have a few questions here, Chair, that I really have to get through. The issue of security, anecdotally, I have been told where pilots have been handed packages by the company, for example, perhaps cash that was raised on an outward flight and it is given to them in a sealed bag to be brought home. That does not make for very good security. Certainly, going back to my military career, I would not have taken a bag like that. But the repackaging issue that you mentioned, can you explain that one to us? What happened was you had a company which had two production facilities, one based in Dublin and one based in Cork. The one based in Dublin carried IAA, preferred consignor status. In other words, it was a secure location. The people working there had all been guarded vetted. So when the cargo or the goods were packed, a sticker was put on it to say it does not need to be rechecked passing security at the airport before being loaded onto an aircraft. The Cork facility did not have the same guard of vetting, the same security clearance. What was happening was the product was boxed in Cork. It was then shrink wrapped onto pallets. It was then brought to the Dublin facility, which is the secure location. The shrink wrap was removed. The boxes were not checked and a new shrink wrap was put on with the security stickers on. There was no attempt to look inside the boxes. A whistleblower came to us and we brought this to the attention of the IAA and they said they would look into it. Now, just to explain our problem… Is this currently the subject to whistleblowers? No, it is not. The whistleblower has gone and left and has not made… He absolutely nearly lost his job because they almost identified him. But this is the point I want to make, Chairman. Obviously, there is a legal process with the whistleblower. There is not at the moment. No, it is all stopped. It is over from the whistleblower's point of view and from ours. The issue that we had was that terrorists, when they are attacking civilian aircraft, they do not use timers as triggers on the bombs. They use a pneumatic pressure because the pressure in the cabin, although it does not decrease at the rate of the aircraft climbing, it decreases at a slower rate, but it goes roughly to about 8,000 feet. So, when your aircraft is at 40,000 feet, the pressure in the cabin is equivalent to being on a mountain of 8,000 feet. And that is how they save money on the thickness of the metal in the aircraft and so on, because it is pressurised. We were of the view that a pneumatic trigger device could be placed in one of those boxes by somebody who simply joined the workforce in Cork, without the guard of vetting and so on. That was our concern. When we approached the IEA, they said they would look after it. It is our fact, based on what we were told and has not been denied by the IEA, that the practice went on for a minimum of six months after the IEA were informed about it. Chairman, you will forgive me. I am going over time here, but I had this debate suspended in this, because I am so deeply concerned about what is going on here. The local runway issue in Dublin, do you want to explain to me what is going on there, please? It is a recommendation from Europe and from all of the big safety organisations about having safety teams, where everybody sits around the table to discuss how they could make the infrastructure safer. One such safety team is called the Local Runway Safety Team at Dublin Airport. IEA did have a seat on it. What happened then was IEA pointed out that Dublin Airport was not adhering to the recommendations of ICAO with regard to tailwinds on the main runway. The commercial interests wanted to maintain the westerly runway as the main runway despite the wind and allow higher limits to be applied before they would change the runway, purely for commercial reasons. We believe, because IEA insisted on adhering to the international recommendation on tailwinds, that we were then excluded from the meetings henceforth and we have never gotten back. As you can see in the correspondence, we complained bitterly to the IEA about this behaviour, that we were being excluded from a safety team because of a commercial motivation at the airport. They have done nothing about it, nothing. There are some suggestions that what you are looking for cuts way across EU regulations, ICAO regulations. Can you tell me, have you taken any legal advice on your amendments and can you sit there hand on heart and tell me that you know you are right? We have taken advice from an aviation specialist barrister. We have also taken advice from experts in Europe on this. We do not cut across any of the EU regulations in what we propose. This is not in terms of the amendments? Our amendments do not cut across. Have you provided this advice to the department? All I can say to you is that we have told them that they have not asked us for the advice. We generally do not give out the advice. But I would ask why do they not produce advice to the contrary? We have challenged them on this. They have never put forward a technical point which says that our amendments cannot be put into the legislation. They have only put the opinion that we would not put that into the primary legislation. I also take issue with the fact that when the IEA were here, the designated chair said, I cannot find a quote, but said, we do not disagree in principle with IELPA. But when you read the letters, that is what the designated chair said at this committee, but when you read the letters from the IEA to the Senate, it is absolutely clear that they disagree in principle with our amendments. Yes. Captain, one last point. It has been said, and you have just said it yourself there, that primary legislation is not the place for your amendments. If we do not put it into the primary legislation, how can we meet the needs of the pilots, the people who are, after all, sitting in the cockpit with three or four hundred lives sitting behind them? How do we get that done? I am really, really concerned and I cannot emphasise this enough today, Chairman. The issue of the peer support group, that to me is absolutely 100 per cent must be independent of every employer. It has to be. I appreciate the point you are making in your amendments, but just on that, Captain. You will have to repeat the question. Sorry, I am just saying, if we are not to put your amendments into primary legislation, can we do it by statutory instrument, for example, or some other way? We do not believe that that is possible. Remember, the IAEA is a very unique organisation. It writes its own statutory instruments, it is not subject to FOI, it is not subject to the jurisdiction of the Ombudsman, and right now it actually operates as a commercial entity. So, it is an extraordinary organisation by any standard, certainly in the Western world, because we have gone around, because other jurisdictions have always made the separation between regulator and policeman, and commercial activities in aviation. For reasons we do not understand, it was a political ideology, I would say, around in 1993, that probably gave us the financial services regulator as well, that we had this unusual entity, which has now, thankfully, been addressed. I am going to finish at this, but before I go, I know we will discuss this in private, but I do believe the legislation should not progress until we have had an independent aviation expert come to this committee and explain to us why these amendments should never be in the legislation. On the amendments that you are putting forward, Mr Captain College, is your advice that those amendments can only be dealt with under the primary legislation that is going through at the moment? Our advice is that it would be very difficult to implement them and adhere to them in a secondary set. Our advice is that they should be in primary to give effect to them. Okay, fine. Mr Cullen, I want to thank you for your time, Captain Burton. Thank you very much indeed. Please keep us in the loop as things move on. It is extremely important. It really is the lives of passengers I am interested in. I know you guys do a professional job, but the passengers are the ones I am concerned for. Senator, I will just make the point that Boeing, when they had their first accident with the 737 MAX, they almost got away with it in convincing it that the pilots were at fault. It was when the second accident happened that the penny dropped, that the fault was in the boardroom in Boeing, not in the cockpit. I think it is fair that Boeing have taken a fair whack on the MAX issue. Mr Cullen, they have admitted an awful lot to it. I attended the committee meetings in Washington on the MAX. I can assure you… Mr Cullen, you will appreciate my role as Chair, right? Yes, I do. Mr Cullen, Boeing is not here. I think it is only there that I met that comment. Mr Cullen, if I could just make one brief point that Senator Croggles made. The Rescue 116 accident investigation report is probably the most significant and insightful piece of writing in the history of Irish aviation. Mr Cullen, on the culture of Irish aviation. What was extraordinary for me was that at our meeting on the 1st of February with Minister Nocton, one of our officials stated that although the elected representatives in this country did not have cited that report when drafting the legislation, it was okay because the civil service did. You, as the elected representative, are charged with the public safety, and we just find it extraordinary that you did not have access to that piece of writing when drafting this legislation. It is extremely insightful on all the things that we have been raising about the culture, and it is the culture in Irish aviation. I speak to what Senator Buttermer said. What we have seen is that we do not have to tell you, so we will not. That is the point. It is the best international practice to share information in the safety industry. What we have been getting for a long time is that we do not have to talk to you, so we will not. That is the problem we are trying to highlight. At our meeting, it was an official who said that they, the officials, had made an assessment of, because they had seen the draft final report, and they had made their assessment that any amendments that would arise from the accident report were already built into the Air Navigation and Transport Bill. But at the same time, they admitted they had no technical expertise. They admit this. It is part of their defence that they do not have technical expertise. Thank you. We are protecting you next day. OK. Well, all the technical expertise is the