Surprising but above all worrying, the BEA report on the safety of Air France flights had the effect of a bomb in the French aviation industry.
The Office of Research and Analysis is concerned about “a certain culture established among some Air France crews that favors a propensity to underestimate the contribution of a strict application of procedures for safety” and asks the French airline to “return compliance of procedures at the heart of the company’s safety culture”.
The BEA is based in particular on an incident that has occurred on December 31, 2020 during a flight between Brazzaville (Congo) and Paris on board an Airbus A330.
Security “does not suffer exceptions”
In a press release, the SNPL (National Union of Air Line Pilots, a majority within the company) questions the deficiencies pointed out by the authority and insists that “flight safety and compliance with procedures are at the center of the exercise of the profession of the airline Air France”. pilots. This priority has no exception and is applied daily by the pilots. We owe it to our passengers as well as our own families.”
For Guillaume Gestas, president of SNPL Air France Transavia “professionalism and respect for procedures are at the heart of the exercise of the Air France airline pilot profession, the spontaneous notification of events allows us to constantly improve our safety and is one of the best in the world. That the strong media coverage, often partial, that our company receives periodically on all topics, does not come to slow down this essential tool”.
And explain that within the Air France company, “spontaneous notification by pilots of events related to flight safety is one of the best in the world. It is a fundamental engine for the continuous improvement of our safety and that of our passengers. Feedback should not be slowed down in any way by biased media coverage of events.”
Recommendations “already implemented”
The union recalls that “many of the recommendations issued by the BEA have already been implemented for several months within Air France, such as, in particular, the possibility for each pilot to access the analysis of their own flights in order to continuously improve their own performance, following the new flight safety protocol built with the SNPL”.
If the BEA highlights the “extremely limited” number of Air France flights giving rise to surveysit says that it observed “through a series of recent investigations … that the crews in question had been able … to free themselves from carrying out certain procedures in a consistent manner.”
For its part, Air France assured AFP that it will take into account all the report’s recommendations, specifying that some have already been implemented. The company is committed, for example, to “provide pilots with tools that allow them to reproduce and analyze their flights”, as recommended by the BEA.
And it affirms that in a few months an audit will begin “in the whole of the company” to “complete, where appropriate, certain analyzes of this report”.
Source: BFM TV
