The evidence of a decline in aviation safety in Canada comes from many sources: from industry experts; pilots, mechanics and their unions; accident investigations; and reports by investigative journalists.
The picture that emerges is a disturbing one: an industry where staff and insiders often fear to travel on their own companies' planes, and a system which increasingly looks like 'an accident looking for someplace to happen'.
The Transportation Safety Board of Canada (TSB) released its annual reassessment of responses to Board recommendations. When the TSB identifies serious safety deficiencies during an investigation, it issues recommendations to the regulator or industry, putting a direct spotlight on what needs to be addressed.
Troubled by slow progress, the TSB is now calling on Transport Canada to intensify efforts on a number of outstanding safety recommendations, especially in aviation.
It's a dark November night at Toronto's Pearson International Airport, and a Learjet 35A is making its way from the general aviation ramp toward its intended departure runway when it is told "«to hold short.»"
Unfamiliar with the airport's layout, however, the flight crew misidentifies the appropriate runway and does not stop—placing them directly in the path of a landing aircraft. Disaster is averted only when the crew of the landing aircraft spots the intruder and manoeuvers to pass behind it.
The Transportation Safety Board has launched an investigation after a plane narrowly missed landing on an empty work van that rolled onto the runway at Pearson Airport early this week.
The near-disaster happened at around 11:40 p.m. ET Monday after a worker for Sunwing Airlines left a maintenance van running and in gear outside one of their Boeing 737s.
The federal transport safety watchdog said Thursday she has seen "little or no change" in critical air-safety issues, including runway overruns and aircraft-landing accidents.
Wendy Tadros, chairwoman of the Transportation Safety Board, first flagged these issues in 2010 when the board released its inaugural safety watchlist. They remain on this year's watchlist alongside a new issue highlighting Transport Canada's weak oversight of smaller aviation companies while they transition to safety-management systems (SMS), with "some companies not even required to have one," the report says.
A fatigued, napping Air Canada co-pilot who awoke, wrongly believed his flight was on a collision course and pushed the plane sharply downward, is to blame for a January 2011 incident that left 16 injured, the Transportation Safety Board reported Monday.
Pilot fatigue, listed as the cause of the incident involving an overnight flight from Toronto to Zurich, has dogged Transport Canada for years, and safety advocates seized on the report to press Canada to update its "significantly deficient" flight and duty times regulations that take into account people's circadian rhythm and address time-of-day sensitivities.
A terrifying incident on an Air Canada flight from Toronto to Zurich last year took place because a pilot abruptly pushed the Boeing 767 into a dive shortly after waking up from an approved nap, says a report released today by Canada's Transportation Safety Board.
The report details what happened on Air Canada Flight 878 several hours after it left Toronto for Zurich on Jan 13, 2011. The report also finds several factors, including pilot fatigue, contributed to the incident that sent seven passengers to hospital in Switzerland.
The wife of one of the 17 offshore oil industry workers who died three years ago today when a Cougar helicopter crashed southeast of Newfoundland is renewing calls to improve offshore chopper safety in the province.
"It makes me angry, and there are times when it makes me really angry,” said Lori Chynn, whose husband, John, was aboard the Sikorsky model S-92a that lost oil pressure shortly after takeoff and plunged into the ocean mid-morning on March 12, 2009.
The sole survivor of the crash of Cougar flight 491 and people who lost loved ones in the tragedy fear their concerns are being ignored by the federal transport minister.
Their lawyer has sent three letters to the minister’s department but by Friday they had not received a response from Transport Minister Denis Lebel or his department.
More than a decade after Swissair Flight 111 crashed into the waters off Peggy's Cove, N.S., new questions have surfaced over what actually caused the plane to go down and how the investigation was conducted.
Tom Juby, a veteran RCMP forensic investigator assigned to the probe, said he uncovered evidence early on that suggested an incendiary device may have been planted on the plane but that he was prevented by his superiors from following up fully on the evidence and was even directed to alter his notes.
