WASHINGTON (AP) — Federal safety investigators called Tuesday for better government oversight of commercial skydiving operations because of too many recurring safety problems with the aircraft and pilots that fly skydivers to their jumps.
The National Transportation Safety Board reached its conclusion after conducting a special investigation into 32 airplane crashes that involved parachute jumpers since 1980, but were unrelated to the risks of skydiving.
Those accidents, which claimed the lives of 172 people, were caused by inadequate inspection and maintenance, pilot error or insufficient oversight by Federal Aviation Administration inspectors, the agency found.
While parachutists assume the risks associated with jumping out of airplanes, the NTSB said those risks should not include preventable hazards involved in flying and maintaining the aircraft itself.
“You expect to be gotten to your destination, whether it’s jumping out of an airplane or landing at your destination,” said NTSB member Steven Chealander. “The biggest safety problem that the jumper faces is getting in that airplane, it seems to me.”
NTSB officials said they are concerned that parachute jump operators who advertise to the public are allowed to fly aircraft under FAA regulations that require little oversight and surveillance despite carrying millions of skydivers each year.
The agency is recommending that the FAA work with the United States Parachute Association — an industry group — to develop guidelines for parachute jump operators to beef up maintenance and inspection programs and improve pilot training on the aircraft used in skydiving.
FAA wasn’t performing inspections
After the NTSB expressed similar concerns in 1994, the FAA decided to perform more ramp inspections of aircraft used in skydiving operations. But NTSB officials said they were disappointed to learn in several recent cases that FAA inspections often were not taking place.
NTSB member Deborah Hersman said she wants to make sure this time “we don’t get the wool pulled over our eyes again.”
“There were a number of accidents in the report that if adequate surveillance would have been performed, those maintenance discrepancies would have been detected,” Hersman said.
Alison Duquette, an FAA spokeswoman, said the agency “would take a hard look at the recommendations and get back to the board as soon as possible.”
The NTSB was prompted to launch the special investigation of aircraft safety in the skydiving industry after the July 29, 2006, crash of a skydiving plane in Sullivan, Mo., that killed the pilot and five passengers. Two other passengers were seriously injured.
A separate NTSB report on Tuesday said the probable cause of the Missouri crash was pilot failure to maintain air speed after losing power in the right engine of the DeHavilland DHC-6 Twin Otter airplane. A contributing factor was the lack of effective seat belt restraints for the passengers, which might have enabled more to survive the crash.
But the report also found such serious maintenance defects with the aircraft itself, that it decided to examine whether those problems were more widespread in the skydiving industry.
The engine, for example, may have failed because it had not been properly overhauled according to the manufacturer’s requirements. Investigators also found that the pilot flew the plane with a propeller system that had been defective for more than two months.
http://www.aviation.com/safety/080917-ap-skydiving-aircraft-safety.html
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