Thank you, Mr. Chair.
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?