Australia’s Transport Workers’ Union (TWU) has called on the Australian government to ban all AirAsia Indonesia flights in and out of the country, pending a safety audit after information was leaked from a preliminary report concerning the investigation into the December 28 crash of AirAsia Flight QZ8501.
In a statement released on February 3, TWU national secretary Tony Sheldon said he had written to the Minister for Infrastructure and Deputy Prime Minister, Warren Truss, demanding that the Civil Aviation Safety Authority carry out an audit into the airline’s staff training, aircraft maintenance and industrial relations conditions.
The union, which represents more than 90,000 transport workers, claimed that the information leaked from the initial findings raised questions about the airline’s pilot training and revealed that the pilots took off without an assessment of the weather conditions. The statement claimed that AirAsia obtained a weather report almost an hour and a half after the airplane departed from Surabaya, Indonesia’s second-biggest city.
“We need to ensure that a rapidly expanding airline like AirAsia Indonesia is not cutting corners to suit a low standard model,” said Sheldon. “We also want to see greater transparency and do not want to have to wait several months before an official report from Indonesia is made public.”
For full Kwik News’ report read HERE.
For background story on safety issues concerning AirAsia read HERE.
