Transport Committee on June 10th, 2014

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Just before we go to Mr. Sullivan, Mr. Blandford, you commented two or three times. Just for clarification to help me understand, you talked about protection of your reporting from your employer, it appears. It seems to me that when a mistake is reported or whatever—and reporting I think is the right thing to do—you're talking about protection from being reprimanded, unless I'm misunderstanding you. If somebody makes a mistake—I'm not going to get into what the penalty or punishment should be—but shouldn't there be some kind of a process in place whereby it is dealt with in some manner?

[Capt Craig Blandford]

Absolutely. There's no way we should be hiding behind flight safety if a deliberate, intentional, or criminally negligent action is taking place. Never. What used to happen in the air force is that we'd have a flight safety stream, and the flight safety person doing the inspection would call the squadron commander and say that the commander needed to start a parallel investigation. That's all he could say, because they'd identified something criminally negligent or damaging. There's no way that can occur. What we're talking about on a day-to-day basis is that the normal flight safety report of something that may cause injury can't then be summoned by lawyers or brought out in court to use for other purposes than safety; otherwise we're not going to get honest and fulsome reporting.

As for what you said, sir, absolutely, we don't condone that at all. We could probably give you examples of flight data management when the gatekeepers have looked and put up a red flag that's caused some ramifications not related to safety.

[Capt Ed Bunoza]

We're getting a little confused with the confidentiality issue and everything. The reports are confidential; no one sees them other than the appropriate people.

Our concern is that several years ago they were getting court orders. I wrote an actual copy of that report. As a line pilot, I'm looking at that and saying that I'm not going to give you a full, robust report because it could end up on the front page of a national newspaper. So now what the guys are writing is, “Took off, had hydraulic failure, landed”. You don't get the meat of what happened there.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Don't take this the wrong way, but it seems pretty irresponsible to me for somebody to say, “Well, if I don't get what I want on the reporting end of it, I just won't report”. That bothers me as a passenger or as somebody who flies quite regularly, so I don't like that.

It seems to me that agreement on the protection of this information is something that your union or your organization needs to take up with your employer. I don't see that Transport Canada needs to get into that.

[Capt Ed Bunoza]

Our employer vehemently fought the release of those reports. They knew what the damage would be.

In a perfect SMS system, that report is meant.... If a city OSH group comes along and says they're concerned about, say, a hard landing somewhere, we want to look at it. The OSH component and the pilot component of that group should look at that report and say yes, these are the details you need. But that actual piece of paper I wrote should never ever be released.

[Capt Dan Adamus]

Mr. Chairman, if I could say, one of the first things that happens when an SMS report is filed is that the receiver looks at it and if they believe it's outside of the parameters of the program, such as maybe it's wilful conduct, they will then immediately say, “You're going to have to file this a different way. This doesn't fit the program”. That's one of the first things that happens.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Who tells you that? Is it Transport or—

[Capt Dan Adamus]

No, it is the operator, whoever the gatekeeper of the SMS is.

You talk about pilot unions talking to the operators. There are a lot of pilots in this country who are not unionized and do not have a formal process to go to their employer.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Good point.

Just one last thing, Mr. Blandford, I believe you mentioned a $3,500 fine for landing too far down the runway. Is that from Transport Canada or your employer?

[Capt Craig Blandford]

No, I was using it as an example of how another jurisdiction in the world has no protections in flight data management and flight data analysis, so they look at the computer at the end of the day and they say, “Oh, you landed too far down the runway, therefore we're going to fine you”.

So there are no protections. They're not using the flight—

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Does that actually happen?

[Capt Craig Blandford]

No, not here, sir. But I'm saying we want protections.... What if somebody wants to do that?

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

I got you. I just wanted to clarify that.

Mr. Sullivan, for five minutes.

[Mike Sullivan, NDP, York South—Weston, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I appreciate the more robust discussion of what's really driving this. We've heard testimony from the railroad industry that is having similar difficulties. The Transportation Safety Board has recommended for the past eight to nine years that there be voice and video recorders on board. The railroad said, “We'll put them in tomorrow as long as you let us use them for disciplinary purposes”.

You don't do that in the airline industry, clearly, and you never have, yet they're there and they're useful, and they're made use of for incidents circumstances. So we're still fighting that old battle.

But your battle, Bill C-6 and Bill C-7 would have corrected, as I understand it. That was first introduced eight years ago. So, what's the hold-up? Has anybody talked to you folks about that? No? It's just sitting there somewhere in a thought of this government.

In terms of the SMS itself, the other thing we have heard in the conduct of our discussions with the railroad industry, in particular, is that SMSs are confidential, proprietary, and competitive pieces of information.

Is there any reason an SMS system should not be disclosed publicly, so we can know exactly what's in it and maybe help work on it?

[John McKenna]

It's not only so much the system, the system is how a company works day-to-day and that is the operations of the company. Sometimes a company will even self-report on incidents or there will be reports following from PVIs or whatever.

That information, when it's disclosed to the government, is no longer protected. We have many members who have been fighting, for example, third party access to commercially sensitive information, that is included in those reports, from being divulged by the company.

For example, if I have a company and I report something to you, within six months or within a period of time, I could get a request from somebody to have access to the information, and I'm not allowed to know by whom the request has been filed. A lot of this information needs to be protected and it isn't in the current legislation.

[Mike Sullivan, NDP, York South—Weston, ON]

Right. In terms of Air Canada in particular, you have a good, strong trade union relationship between yourselves and Air Canada. So you have managed to protect the integrity of the SMS system from the prying eyes of the outside world—some of it anyway—and from disciplinary use.

I guess the problem that some members of this committee are having is with human nature. If you're going to get punished for something, you're not going to talk about it. Safety can't be like that. It's essentially right.

[Capt Craig Blandford]

You've hit the nail on the head, sir. That's exactly it.

We're not trying to prevent anything from being publicly accessed. We want to enhance safety. And what is the best way to enhance safety? It's a safety culture. It's open reporting and a good system that identifies the safety issues and a mechanism for fixing them. Then when we can't agree as stakeholders and an operator, the regulator should help us provide a mechanism for fixing those problems. That's the closed loop as simply as I can state it.

[Mike Sullivan, NDP, York South—Weston, ON]

The other testimony that we had last week, which I don't know if you guys heard, is that Transport Canada is planning for more air accidents over the next few years. Their accident rate target per 100,000 flight hours goes from 6.3 in 2010-11 to 6.7 in 2014-15, which is essentially 40 to 50 more accidents in the air or on the ground in Canada over the next three or four years.

That seems to smack of a failure of some system or other, whether it's SMS or Transport Canada. Do you folks have any comment on that?

[Capt Craig Blandford]

I was shocked when I read that number. Speaking quite frankly, like I should be doing here, I think—

[Mike Sullivan, NDP, York South—Weston, ON]

Absolutely.

[Capt Craig Blandford]

I was very shocked and it's unbelievable. I can't believe it. I'm not sure of the source. I would love to be able to dig deeper, because we see everything getting better and safer in the world that we fly in. Airplanes are safer. They're built stronger. The monitoring systems are better. Pilots are well-trained. We have good systems and to see that was quite surprising for me. I'm not sure what Dan would say.

[Capt Dan Adamus]

I'm not too sure where their numbers came from either, but if they are valid then we should be promoting SMS even more, so that we can find those areas that need to be fixed and we can be proactive.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

I'm sorry, Mr. Sullivan.

[Mike Sullivan, NDP, York South—Weston, ON]

I have where it came from.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Okay. I'll allow it.