:
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I am very pleased to have this opportunity to contribute to the committee's study on aviation safety and security.
As the chair mentioned, my colleagues joining me here today are Dr. Charles Théroux, who is our director of research, and Monette Maillet, who is our director of policy.
[Translation]
The best value that the Commission can bring to you as a witness is to provide our perspective on the human rights considerations that should be taken into account when developing and implementing national security tools and measures, such as profiling.
Terrorism and other threats jeopardize our fundamental right to life and security of the person. In a free and democratic society, the protection of the population must be of paramount importance.
[English]
The Canadian Human Rights Commission recognizes that safeguarding national security is a critical function of government. It also recognizes the expertise of security agencies in developing tools and measures for this purpose.
When national security and human rights are discussed, it is often suggested that we must give up one to have the other. I come to you today to express the position of the commission that both can and must coexist.
[Translation]
The mandate of the Canadian Human Rights Commission covers all federally-regulated employers and service providers. This includes the transportation sector and border services. The Canadian Human Rights Act prohibits discrimination in employment and in the provision of services based on 11 prohibited grounds of discrimination. These include race, colour, national or ethnic origin, religion and disability.
In the context of national security, the jurisdiction of the Commission would be triggered when it is alleged that a national security measure discriminates against individuals based on one or more of these prohibited grounds.
[English]
This is because the implementation of national security measures such as screening of airline passengers falls under the definition of service and is therefore within our mandate. Under section 5 of our act, it is a discriminatory practice in the provision of services to deny access to a service or to differentiate adversely in relation to any individual. However, not every measure that discriminates on the basis of a prohibited ground would necessarily be disallowed. The key is whether or not the measure is justifiable.
Paragraph 15(1)(g) of our act provides this exemption: it is not a discriminatory practice if an individual is denied services “or is a victim of any adverse differentiation and there is bona fide justification for that denial or differentiation”.
Human rights jurisprudence provides guidance for determining whether a measure that is discriminatory can be justified. The test would include looking at, first, the extent to which the measure is necessary; second, whether there are less discriminatory ways of achieving the same objective; third, the effectiveness of the measure; and fourth, the extent to which the infringement on human rights outweighs the benefits gained by the measure.
I will now turn to the issue of profiling. Where profiles are appropriately constructed and applied, the practice of profiling could have the potential to reduce the number of individuals who are identified for further screening. The use of profiling as a national security measure—for example, during screening at airports—raises human rights issues when the characteristics and behaviours identified in the profile are linked to one or more of the prohibited grounds. For example, profiling by identifying persons who have paid cash for a one-way ticket, do not check luggage, etc., is not linked to one or more of our prohibited grounds. On the other hand, identifying persons based on a certain race or ethnic origin would be.
[Translation]
As part of its mandate to develop and advance human rights knowledge, the Canadian Human Rights Commission initiated a research program on national security and human rights post 9/11. One report is the one you have before you entitled “The Effectiveness of Profiling From a National Security Perspective.” This report is a literature review of studies that have been done on the issue of profiling. It notes the general lack of scientific rigour in most of the studies reviewed. As a result, the authors recommend that further research be conducted on the use of profiling using a rigorous approach to development and validation that incorporates a solid evaluation component.
[English]
The report also mentions the challenges faced by any agency wanting to develop a scientifically based profile when the frequency of events such as terrorist attacks is very low. I must emphasize that the research has shown that there's no evidence to support the effectiveness of profiling where race or ethnic origin is the primary characteristic.
My key message to you today relates to the use of profiling as a tool in safeguarding national security. Such profiling could only be compatible with human rights principles when the characteristics used in the profile are based on demonstrable need, intelligence, and/or evidence, and documented effectiveness.
Currently, few security and law enforcement agencies are collecting data on the discretionary decisions being made by their front line personnel. There is a concern amongst many of our stakeholders that, in the absence of intelligence or evidence-based profiles, these officers may fall back on stereotypes and prejudicial assumptions in making such decisions. Absent the collection of relevant human rights-based data, it will be difficult for executive management to determine whether inappropriate profiling is occurring and to take corrective measures where necessary. For this reason, the collection of data should be a consideration at the design phase.
The Canadian Human Rights Commission has been and will continue to be available to provide support and expertise to agencies in the development of security measures and tools.
I would like to conclude with a few words about the importance of consulting with persons with disabilities to ensure that their rights are taken into account in the design of all transportation-related policies, programs, and structures. For example, our stakeholders have expressed concern that airplanes have been designed with cabins too narrow for personal wheelchairs and that the new full-body scanners are not accessible to people with certain disabilities, thus denying them the choice offered to other passengers. At this juncture in our history, at a time when Canada has just ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, I encourage all to make the principles of the convention a reality in everyday life.
I look forward to answering your questions.
:
I certainly agree with you, sir, that the risk assessment applies to national security. We don't use the language of risk when we're talking about human rights, sir.
In terms of my general statements, of course, what I'm saying is that I'm reluctant to make general statements about matters that could come before the Canadian Human Rights Commission that could require us, in a specific set of facts, to make a certain determination.
I can't come before a parliamentary committee and make bald statements that might be used later to suggest that we have a leaning one way or the other. We have to look at each case on its facts.
On the other hand, the Canadian Human Rights Act has a quite lyrical purposive section that says that the purpose of this act is to give effect to the principle that every individual should have the right, equal with others, to make for themselves the life that they're able and wish to have, free from discrimination. It's certainly what inspires me and my colleagues every day.
To that end, where we have a large mandate, to be able to get ahead of the problem, to sit down with the organizations that are engaged in developing security measures, structures, etc., and help them to be sensitive at the front end to the questions they ask, the methodologies they develop, and the structures, as I mentioned, there will be a compatibility, there will be fewer complaints, and people will be able to make for themselves the lives they're able to and wish to have, free from discrimination.
As you mentioned, my name is Captain Paul Strachan, and I am the president of the Air Canada Pilots Association. I hail from Winnipeg, Manitoba. I spent a ten-year career as an air force pilot before commencing my commercial career, and I have been flying for about 22 years.
With me here is Captain Tim Manuge. He is the chair of the ACPA security committee. Tim is from Halifax, Nova Scotia, and spent 20 years as an RCMP reserve officer and 36 years now as a pilot.
Next to him is Captain Barry Wiszniowski, hailing from Drumheller, Alberta. Most of us live in Barrie now, though. He worked for eight years as an air force aircraft maintenance engineer and 24 years now as a pilot. Interestingly, he is also an aviation accident investigator, and he is the chair of our technical and safety division at the Air Canada Pilots Association.
Our organization represents the largest group of professional pilots in the country, some 3,000 men and women who fly Canada's mainline fleet. Obviously, if you are following my slide presentation, then you know intuitively that we fly tens of thousands of people on a daily basis--in, we are very proud to say, a very safe fashion, and often in very trying circumstances. Our environment is one of the harshest on the planet, in fact, in terms of aviation, so we are proud of that record and we believe we carry a lot of international credibility as a result. So we can offer the committee a unique perspective on issues pertaining certainly to aviation safety and to aviation security as well, and that is what we would like to highlight for you today.
I will briefly make comments on SMS as it pertains to the industry; on flight times and duty times, a matter of interest and a matter of concern for us for most of the last couple of decades; and aviation security, which has already been discussed this morning.
ACPA's number one priority is safety. It is our first and foremost responsibility and we take it very seriously. We maintain a full-time division of our organization dedicated solely to technical and safety issues, of which Captain Wiszniowski is the chair, and we spend a lot of time and effort separating the activities of our technical and safety division from our representational and industrial activities as the certified bargaining agent for the Air Canada pilots. So we jealously guard that credibility and we're very careful not to mix the two. Our security committee works closely with several government agencies on the issue of aviation security in support of those issues.
If I may, looking first at safety management systems, the Air Canada Pilots Association supports the SMS initiative. We have a mature relationship with our employer. I think it would be fair to say that many, if not the majority, of the advancements in aviation safety within the industry within the last 30 to 40 years stem from that relationship between Air Canada and its pilots group, both this one and its predecessor.
In that mature and cooperative relationship, SMS works very well. Other carriers do not necessarily enjoy the same robust relationship with their employer, so that is a caution for the committee. ACPA believes that strong oversight from the regulator remains required in an SMS environment.
Flight time and duty time regulations: this has been a matter of some interest recently, but you can see from our first slide that it has been in fact a matter of interest for quite a long time. Our current flight time and duty time regime was developed in the 1960s, in fact before seat belts were mandatory in automobiles. It was cosmetically amended in the mid-1990s, and a lot has changed since then. There has obviously been rapid advancement in aircraft technology, allowing aircrafts to fly higher and much farther than they have in the past, and obviously the scientific knowledge surrounding fatigue and those physiological factors that are a reality in any industry, but certainly in ours given those changes, has evolved as well.
If you look at our slide on the effects on performance of fatigue versus alcohol, it captures a good parallel there between hours of wakefulness and relative tracking performance on the Y axis versus blood alcohol concentration. This derives as a result of the work of a pre-eminent research scientist in Australia by the name of Drew Dawson.
Canada trails the world, unfortunately. ICAO has recently called on member states to update their flight time and duty time prescriptive regulations to be based upon science. Europe has already changed its own some time ago. The U.S. is in the process of implementing changes to their regime. Unfortunately, we here in Canada are now proposing a CARAC process to commence sometime this summer. CARAC is kind of like baseball in that after you hit the ball, it takes a couple of years to get to first base. And there's obviously no guarantee at the end of that process that any effective change will result.
We don't believe this looks good on any of us, whether we be regulators, airlines, or operating pilots. It's far past time for Canada to amend its regime, and we're here to help you do that, to help the government move forward, and the regulator to bring those amendments into place, because currently we are not compliant with the ICAO stipulations.
The next chart is probably the most visually grabbing. On the X axis are hours of the clock from 1 to 24, and on the Y axis are hours on duty, limitation of hours on duty, from nine at the bottom up to 14 at the top.
You can see there's a green line on here, in between the U.S.A. Aviation Rulemaking Committee, the United Kingdom's CAP 371, and the European operations regime. The green line is the contract we've negotiated at the bargaining table for our regime. But they're all approximating the same thing: they recognize that those back-of-the-clock hours are not times of day when we perform to the highest of our abilities.
Now, clearly--as I say, we've negotiated this--safety should not be negotiable. What we need is a regulator to set a level playing field for all parties to live by, based on that evolution in science that has occurred and on how much more we know about it today.
That red line across the top represents the current Canadian aviation regulations. This is based on two pilots, so it's not going into depth in terms of ultra-long-range operations and things like that, but those are things we need to discuss as well.
Perhaps most astounding in this chart is that, if you can imagine, a pilot today could be on call from five o'clock in the morning until nine o'clock in the evening, and receive a call for work and report for work prior to nine o'clock in the evening and operate to the limit of that red line.
So Canada needs leadership, and it has to come from the regulator. When we have approached the regulator on this, as we've done several times in the last couple of decades, they have told us that we didn't have any Canadian data and that we needed to collect it.
So we set about doing that, and we are collecting data, but of course anything we might collect is both tainted and flawed. It's tainted de facto because people automatically assume that there's some sort of industrial agenda here. If you flip back to the chart, you'll see very quickly that there is no industrial impact to our members whatsoever. We've negotiated what approximates what the regulatory regime should be, so this is a warm-water issue for our members. It's the right thing to do from a public policy perspective.
To level the playing field, again, we offer you our assistance and support, but we need a responsive process most of all, and the CARAC process is not that. We're looking at years down the road before we effect any change. The data is there. The science is there. Other jurisdictions have moved. So we strongly support rapid movement on this. We certainly don't want another accident in Canada attributable to pilot fatigue. That's body-bag safety policy, and we don't want to see that here.
On security issues, recent events, including the bombing attempt in Detroit of last Christmas, have revived fears again. We welcome the government's focus on improving security, particularly on behavioural pattern recognition. We feel that this must be done in ways that don't discourage travel by the innocent public, because doing so is simply rewarding terrorism. So we have to find responsive means to address the real threat. From our perspective, we do see problems with the current security structure. However, we seek to make a constructive contribution. The point of the exercise is not to apportion blame but to improve the Canadian aviation safety regime, and we're anxious to participate and assist in that endeavour.
Technology is only one part of it. When you think about it, there are two sides to the sphere. One side of the sphere is keeping bad things off planes, which we've spent an awful lot of time doing, but we haven't really paid a lot of attention to keeping bad people off planes.
And really, those things aren't all bad; they're only potentially bad. They have to be in the hands of a bad person in order to be a threat.
So we're happy to hear that we're going to be paying more attention to keeping bad people off planes as opposed to just bad stuff.
We are in fact finalizing a lengthy study on the state of the Canadian aviation security regime. We expect that a final copy should be ready in about a month's time.
We would be happy, Mr. Chair, to provide the committee with a copy of that, should it be interested.
If you could indulge me, Mr. Chair, could my colleagues perhaps each give you a one-minute brief comment before we sum up?
:
Mr. Chairman, distinguished members, thank you for the opportunity.
Captain Paul here indicated that we're finalizing a white paper on security, which we've been authorizing from the security committee. We hope there will be viable recommendations for your consideration. These mostly stem from discussions with our members on a daily involvement on the front line of the airline industry, from discussions with other pilots, both domestic and internationally, and from attending many of the international security conferences.
In the interests of brevity, I'll confine my remarks quickly to outlining a couple of main concerns that we have from the ACPA security committee.
In the aftermath of 9/11, we recommended that a single federal government department be responsible for civil aviation security. This did not occur. Currently, civilian airport authorities, crown corporations, and numerous other bodies all own parts of the aviation security program in Canada. We have carefully assessed the system as to the way it now operates, and we reaffirm our recommendation for a single federal government department to manage the aviation security in Canada.
Second, the position is that we need to fight terrorism through proactive intelligence-gathering and good police work. I cite a very strong case here of the liquid bombers in England in August 2006. They were not brought down as a result of screening. They were solely brought down as a result of good investigative work, good intelligence, good police work.
As a part of the proactive effort, we are also very much in favour of the behavioural pattern system using behavioural pattern recognition techniques; however, we are opposed to it being implemented and utilized by CATSA.
Frankly, we believe this may cause more problems than it resolves. Behaviour pattern recognition is a complex program. It requires experience, and operators who are intuitive and can establish trust within the airport community.
Finally, we're anxious to see affirmation of several recent government reports, including the Auditor General's report on airports, the RCMP criminal intelligence report--called the “SPAWN report”--and the CATSA review, which all basically state that ground crew access to air terminals remains a pre-eminent threat. ACPA supports additional scrutiny in all ingress and egress points at airports and the screening of these employees, their company equipment, trolleys, and bags.
Those are our major concerns. More specific measures will be spelled out in our white paper, as mentioned.
Thank you very much for this opportunity.
Good morning, members of the committee.
My name is Dan Adamus. I'm here representing the Airline Pilots Association, International. I'm the president of ALPA's Canada board. I'm a pilot with Air Canada Jazz ,and have been for 25 years.
With me today is Mr. Al Ogilvie. He is ALPA's government affairs representative in Canada.
We appreciate the opportunity to appear before you today to express our views on aviation safety and security. I'll take the opportunity to speak to SMS and security issues.
ALPA represents more than 53,000 professional pilots who fly for 38 airlines in Canada and the United States. As our members' certified bargaining agent and as their representative in all areas affecting their safety and professional well-being, ALPA is the principal advocate for pilots in North America. ALPA therefore has a significant interest in all issues affecting aviation in Canada, and is here today to speak to you about ALPA's experience with safety and security matters.
We support the effective implementation of safety management systems in aviation companies that are regulated and certified by Transport Canada. ALPA has embraced SMS as the next great leap forward in advancing aviation safety. We see it as a comprehensive corporate approach to safety that involves both management and employees.
You may ask why ALPA so strongly supports SMS. We do so for many reasons. It clearly establishes accountability for safety at the highest levels within a company. It provides for the reporting of safety occurrences and information without fear of retribution. It requires employee involvement and a formal risk assessment and decision-making process, to name but a few.
Under SMS, a company is not able to ignore a safety issue by saying they are compliant with applicable regulations. If a safety hazard is known or has been identified, a company is required to do a risk assessment and make a conscious decision on what mitigations are required to deal with it.
SMS clearly establishes responsibility for safety where it belongs, and that's with the aviation industry. The traditional method of safety oversight, which is based on detailed technical inspections, may appear to take on the role of operational safety insurance, and that may allow the aviation industry to lapse into thinking and believing that safety is the government's responsibility.
We believe these provisions are absolutely essential to the success of a company's SMS, and can explain our position as follows.
To proactively address safety issues, data is required.
Strategies to enhance safety need to be data-driven.
In the absence of accidents, the right kind of data is required.
Human and organizational factors create errors or hazards that remain largely undetected until the right set of circumstances results in a bad occurrence.
An organizational climate where people feel free from negative consequences when reporting errors, deficiencies, and hazards is essential to obtaining all the data that is available.
Therefore, a reporting program must provide confidentiality and immunity from discipline to be effective. Of course, exceptions would be a wilful or deliberate act, gross negligence, or a criminal act.
It's been ALPA's experience that most companies initiating safety management systems have fully embraced the concepts, adopting a safety culture from top to bottom. Some do not. We have heard expressions of concern regarding protections from punishment and for confidentiality in reporting.
In some situations, personnel who bring forth safety concerns or self-report incidents have still been subject to disciplinary action. The effect is that employees cease to self-report, which stifles the flow of data, thus defeating the very premise of the safety management system.
In these instances, the company has the SMS on paper but has failed to change its culture.
Just to be clear, ALPA supports the effective implementation of an SMS, but our experience shows that a company may be technically compliant but not embrace the underlying concepts. Such an SMS is not an effective SMS.
Even with effective safety management systems, it is still the minister's responsibility to provide comprehensive and effective oversight and to take the appropriate measures when necessary.
When it is apparent that a company does not fulfill its obligations under an SMS, we believe traditional oversight should be utilized rather than the SMS audit system.
ALPA understands that Transport Canada has delayed implementation of SMS for 703 and 704 operators, and is in agreement with the decision. It is a relatively simple matter to legislate the requirement of an SMS, but you cannot legislate the culture change required for an effective SMS. Therefore, taking the extra time for education, encouragement, and mentoring of these operators will be beneficial in the long term, as ALPA believes a voluntary, confidential, and non-punitive reporting program is an essential element of an effective SMS.
Switching to security, today I would like to speak to behavioural recognition techniques, the air travellers security charge, and cargo security funding.
Pilots who fly commercial aircraft are on the front line, and for the last quarter century or so have lived through the evolution of a security system that has seen its share of challenges in meeting threats to aviation safety. Aviation security screening has long focused on the interdiction of threat objects such as guns, knives, and improvised explosive devices. The weapons of choice for attacking aircraft have evolved over time, and the methods for concealing these weapons continually change. The one constant for all would-be attackers, however, is hostile intent.
Current screening procedures are predicated on two general assumptions: every passenger poses an equal threat with limited exceptions; and the primary focus of screening is to identify objects that could be used to harm individuals and/or the aircraft.
As a result, when terrorist tactics change, and/or a different weapon or threat object is used, the security system is reactively adjusted to that new object or tactic. Over time, inadequate responses to the problem have the effect of creating a patchwork of band-aids. Accordingly, we need to shift our resources to identify the person who poses the threat in order to prevent intended malicious acts.
The present security screening philosophy must be altered to embrace two principles. The vast majority of passengers are trustworthy and pose very little or no threat to the flight. The only means of providing genuine security is to positively identify known, trustworthy passengers; process them in an expeditious manner; and concentrate our finite, high-technology behavioural screening resources on the small percentage of passengers whose trustworthiness is unknown or in doubt.
Such a proactive security system aims to defeat the terrorists by anticipating future threats. It would be much more effective and efficient than current security protocols, and reduce security-related inconvenience and delays for the vast majority of the travelling public while protecting passenger privacy to the maximum practical extent. Therefore, ALPA supports the recently announced initiative to introduce the concept of behaviour recognition techniques and a trusted traveller program.
ALPA has continuously objected to the air travellers security charge being imposed on the airline industry, and reiterates its objection to the recent 50% increase in those charges. I've been before this committee over probably 15 years, and I think this comes up almost every time.
The aviation industry is an integral part of the economy in this country. It ties our country together. Canada's aviation infrastructure is a benefit to all Canadians and Canada, and it should not be subjected to unique user fees. Aviation security is of national interest, not one restricted to the airline industry or its passengers. Its cost, like policing or national defence, should be borne by all Canadians rather than through user fees.
Did those who lost their lives in the World Trade Center on 9/11 have anything to do with aviation? Again, aviation is of national interest.
Charging air travellers to recover the cost of security imposes an extra burden on our airline industry. Our airlines operate on unprecedentedly thin margins, and the imposition of another tax on them will further discourage air travel. It may take only another unforeseen circumstance, such as the recent European experience with volcanic activity, to end the operations of another carrier. In recent history we have seen Zoom Airlines and more recently Skyservice cease operation. The last thing air carriers need is an additional tax by another name.
ALPA has long been a proponent of one level of safety and security, not differentiating between passenger and cargo operations where safety and security are concerned. Therefore, we are heartened to see that the budget did allocate an additional $37.6 million over two years to implement a comprehensive air cargo security regime. These funds are much needed, as there is a stark difference between the security afforded passenger operations and that protecting all cargo operations.
Even at large hub airports, access to all cargo operations is much too open. Inadequate threat assessments are used to identify potential insider threats, and security procedures training for pilots and other critical personnel is largely absent. These and other problems plague all cargo operations and must be addressed.
In conclusion, ALPA has been monitoring your hearings and listening carefully to the opinions and positions of the various organizations and individuals who have appeared before you. We're pleased to see much interest in and positive feedback to aviation safety and security issues.
I want to take this opportunity to thank you, the members of the committee, for your time and your efforts. Although you do not always agree on the solutions, I'm pleased to see your continued efforts to enhance aviation safety and security for all Canadians.
I appreciate the time today and would be pleased to answer any questions you may have.
Thank you.
:
Mr. Chair, I'd like to share my time with Mr. Kania.
You know, we want to discuss the implementation of the SMS system and of course some of the security measures that have been put in place. I've noted that all of the witnesses who have come forward have objected to the additional tax that's being placed on air travellers.
We've learned that now the government is going to raise some $3.2 billion over the course of the next five years in order to cover some of the additional investments--that's another word for taxes--on air travel.
But if I could, I'd like to go back to two issues. First, every time you've come here, you've supported the implementation of an SMS system. And on every occasion you have said that you wanted greater input by the regulator; you wanted an active regulator. That's my word, but that's how I've interpreted what you said.
I note here from some of the notes that everybody else has that the SMS system essentially began in about 2001. Over the course of the next six years, there were staged introductions and anticipation that the industry would begin to take care of itself.
Then, contrary to one of the key elements that all of you have always maintained be there, sometime after 2006 we started to see a reduction in the numbers of inspectors by the regulator, so much so that the Canadian Business Aviation Association was, as you know, decertified for the purposes of establishing an SMS system.
You know, this is what bothered me. It irked me when I heard you talk about how the industry should take control. The Transportation Safety Board found that Transport Canada assessed the CBAA in 2006 and found that its monitoring and quality assurance was inadequate, and yet Transport Canada closed its assessment of CBAA without having approved a corrective action plan.
So my question is how far can we trust the industry, of which you are a part?
Part of the ICAO recommendations at the working groups were that the flight and duty times be based on scientific data. As Captain Strachan mentioned earlier, our flight duty times were written in 1965. There was a slight change when the ANOs came into effect in 1969 and again in 1996, when the change to the flight and duty times came about.
With reference to the CARAC process for flight and duty times, I pulled off the Internet yesterday the CARAC working group status from 1994 to present. In section III, the flight and duty time working group was established in 1996, and there has not been a final report presented to the CARAC decision-making group. There are no regulatory initiatives tabled to the technical working group, and the file remains open.
An e-mail that I received last week from Transport Canada says that the CARAC file 2100-51-6-3, dated December 1996, will be removed from the website during the next scheduled update because it doesn't pertain to a national deliberation working group.
On June 28 of this year, the CARAC process is reinitiating the flight time working group, but we want to make sure that we recognize that our rules do not have any scientific base to them as they are today. You can see that by the 14-hour flat line on the top of the graph, because it doesn't account for circadian lows, backside of the clock, or time shift. A number of parameters aren't there.
We've been collecting the data. Our data is based on what Air New Zealand has been doing. We're attending international conferences and working groups trying to move this forward. As Captain Strachan said, it doesn't affect our association, because we're basically following the bell curve of every other jurisdiction in the world except Canada.
In a meeting we had last week at which ICAO and IFALPA were present, we saw that Canada's regulations are better than those of only two other countries in the world: one is Bulgaria and the other is Gabon, in west Africa.
So where are we? We have to move our regulations forward, and that's what our purpose is here.
There should be one level of safety. Whether you get on an Air Canada flight or a northern carrier flight, whether you're someone working off the coast or anywhere in Canada, every Canadian should expect to have the same level of safety.
We know that accidents are going to happen; we don't want another fatigue-related tragic event to occur before we say we should have done something. Our association is doing as much as we can, and now we're putting it back to your expertise and the government's expertise to see where we're going to move from here.
:
Well, clearly, that is one of the takeaways out of the SMS investigation afterwards, to examine the process of assigning alternates to aircraft.
We do it based on a risk assessment as well; it may not be a scientific one. But there's no reason at that time of night, given the weather conditions as they were, to expect that the Winnipeg airport would be closed. An aircraft becoming disabled on the runway is a pretty unusual circumstance.
Once the aircraft is diverted to Grand Forks, North Dakota, several issues come into play.
By fluke, the aircraft had departed with an unserviceable auxiliary power unit. Now it was sitting on the ground in Grand Forks with the inability to deliver power to the aircraft for the refueling process without some internal source of power. At that point, it means an engine, because that's all that's left.
Normally what would happen is that our crews would disembark the passengers and we'd carry on in normal fashion. However, in this instance there was a U.S. Customs and Border security guard standing at the bottom of the jetway saying “There's absolutely no way on earth that anybody is getting off that aircraft right now”. So it's a sort of a Texas standoff from that.
It's interesting to note that the manufacturer of the aircraft, the A320, in fact publishes a procedure for “engine on” refueling. It's not incorporated into our normal operating procedures; however, faced with the situation they were faced with, I think our crew did an exemplary job of operating as safely as possible in a situation that almost nobody could contemplate. You can't write regulations for every possible situation that's going to occur. In the circumstances, as they always do, our crews did an excellent job in the situation with which they were faced.
There has been some speculation—