Airline stood down pilots after crash in FSM

By CLARISSA MOI
AIR Niugini has stood down the two pilots of its B737 aircraft which crashed last Septembers in the sea near the Chuuk international airport in the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM).
Air Niugini managing director Alan Milne said it was the normal internal process of investigation, applying the “just culture” to the outcome of that investigation.
Milne welcomed the report released by the Accident Investigation Commission (AIC) yesterday.
He said they would continue their own internal investigation.
“We are continuing with our investigations. We think there’s a lot more around the human factors piece,” he said.
“We know what happened. (I think) we need to do a little bit more work to decide why it happened, why the pilots made the decisions they did in that situation.”
Milne said the human factor part of any accident investigation piece was enormous and they wanted to continue down that path.
He said the final report by the AIC did not really state that it was human error.
“They are not in that position to do that. They are stating the facts as they see them.” Milne said it was their responsibility now to continue down the path to see what happened.
“(We need) to see what were the human factors that pushed the pilots to make the decisions they did.
“(When) we know that intricately, we’ll make that call after that point.
“We welcome the final report that will help us. We will apply the standard Air Niugini internal process of following our just culture.”
He said there were a lot of things that happened in the cockpit which influenced the pilots in their decisions.
“So we will put all that together and come up with the final report.”
Milne said as stated in the AIC report, there were lots of warnings going on and some of it were not relevant to that particular approach.
“And I think putting investigations down to a pilot error is probably not the right outcome because back in the 1970s, that’s what most investigations came out with.
“We’re lot more materialised than this. We have to see (what was) the systemic or operational issues that contributed to the decisions they did.”
The National was told that the names of the pilots were in the AIC report. But there were no names there.