Transport Committee on April 4th, 2017

[Vance Badawey, Liberal, Niagara Centre, ON]

If I may say so, that's exactly what our intentions are.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Thank you all very much.

I will suspend and say thank you to the witnesses at this time. We will be cutting short our next presenters as well, so I'd like to try to give them as much time as we can.

I'm sure if the committee members have additional questions, Ms. Fox, they're able to email or communicate with you to get those answers. If you have additional information on any of the questions you heard today, please supply it to the clerk. We would appreciate supplementary answers if you have any.

I will suspend momentarily so that the upcoming group of witnesses can take their places.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

I am calling our meeting back to order.

For the second 45 minutes, we have Fred Jones, president and chief executive officer of the Helicopter Association of Canada, and Carlos DaCosta, airline coordinator at the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers in Canada. We also have, as individuals, Jonathan Histon, adjunct professor at the University of Waterloo, and, by video conference, Gregory Belenky, research professor at Washington State University.

Thank you, all, very much for joining us.

I will turn to Mr. Jones to open up our discussion.

[Fred Jones, President and Chief Executive Officer, Helicopter Association of Canada]

Thank you, and good afternoon.

You have a copy of my written introduction notes in front of you. I am going to skip over the mandate of the Helicopter Association of Canada and the part about myself, but I would like to take a moment to introduce Sylvain Séguin, who is attending with me here today. He is vice-president and COO of Canadian Helicopters Limited, the largest Canadian domestic helicopter operator. He is also the immediate past chair of the Helicopter Association of Canada board of directors. He served on our board for the last seven years.

We have structured our presentation to tailor it to the items identified in your aviation safety outline.

Thank you for the opportunity to appear before the committee on the subject of aviation safety, an issue very important to the Helicopter Association of Canada.

We are the national voice for the helicopter industry in Canada. There are currently more than 2,800 helicopters registered in Canada, of which more than 1,800 are commercially registered. In the commercial sector, our industry employs 6,200 full-time equivalents, with employees earning over $500 million annually. With indirect employment, this increases to 8,900 full-time equivalents and a $640-million annual payroll. The average full-time wage is $80,000.

The sector generates GDP of almost $1 billion, and $2.1 billion in economic impact annually. The annual tax contribution is approximately $285 million at all levels of government. We are pleased to provide the committee with a copy of a recent independent economic impact study that will provide more specific details on these economic factors and what it is that the members of the association do.

The Canadian helicopter community is actively involved in the development of industry best practices. I sit on the executive committee of the International Helicopter Safety Team. In the last 10 years, and in the face of rising utilization, we have seen our accident rate decline significantly. I direct you to the HAC website and the International Helicopter Safety Team website for further details.

Helicopters are a unique, vital, and often irreplaceable form of transportation in Canada. We are often the only option to reach many remote locations. We lead and support life-saving missions, including search and rescue, emergency medical transport, and evacuation from disaster-stricken communities. The recent Fort McMurray wildfire and major accidents on the Sea-to-Sky Highway are common scenarios.

Mining and resource sectors are heavily dependent on helicopter services for surveying, development, and ongoing support of major mining and oil and gas developments. Offshore oil, the oil sands, and most mining developments, due to their remote nature, depend heavily on helicopter support, making the helicopter industry a crucial component of the primary economic drivers of the Canadian economy. Without helicopters, these activities could not happen, or they would cost considerably more to carry out.

On the subject of personnel issues, this past week Transport Canada issued a notice of intent to proceed with new fatigue management regulations for pilots, with the draft regulations to be gazetted later this spring. In a letter two months ago, and when we met with Minister Garneau two weeks ago, we specifically asked the minister to pause this process to allow parliamentarians on this committee the full opportunity to do their work with this study. We also asked him to pause while the Transportation Safety Board concluded its investigation into air taxi accidents. Unfortunately, this pause did not occur.

First, let me be abundantly clear. The Helicopter Association supports reasoned efforts to improve aviation safety that are proportional to the risk. These new regulations, however, are not proportional to the risk and will serve only to put our services beyond the reach of Canadians in many areas. Fatigue-related risks are largely being managed in the helicopter industry, which is not to say that some changes should not occur. But the proposed changes will erode safety, not improve it. What's more, when changes do not improve safety, they will make it more difficult and costly for our members to provide essential and life-saving services.

You may have heard, “A pilot is a pilot, and fatigue is fatigue”, but one set of rules cannot apply to everyone. Helicopter operators cannot be regulated on this subject like the airlines. Unfortunately, this view has pervaded the Department of Transport right up to the minister's office, and the result is a flawed, one-size-fits-all set of proposed regulations. They will not improve safety but will erode it, in our view.

Our pilots are subject to fatigue, but it must be addressed differently in our industry than in the airline industry, for the following reasons.

Because of the seasonal nature of the work that we do, particularly our service to remote and northern communities, HAC would argue that the proposed new regulations are more suited to the airlines than they are to helicopter operations. They do not adequately contemplate deployed camp operations, where our pilots live on the job site while conducting remote operations. Helicopter pilots are not airline pilots.

Another reason is the unscheduled work that we do in deployed operations, which is often at a camp setting where replacement crews are difficult to supply, particularly on short notice. There are long daylight hours in northern Canada. As well, it is important to consider the life-saving emergency medical services, or EMS operations, in our work in support of the resource industries.

In the helicopter world, the proposed rules will do little to advance safety and in most cases are not supported by anchor points in the fatigue-related science—most notably in the removal of the zeroing provisions and the use of cumulative duty hours.

HAC would argue that these new regulations will affect safety but in a negative way, particularly for the majority of helicopter operators who provide services in Canada's most isolated regions.

Would limiting pilots to one hour of flying each day reduce the effect of fatigue on safety? I use this ridiculous example to illustrate that the key to balancing the restrictive nature of the regulations with their impact on safety is to ensure that the restrictions they impose are proportional to the risk that they are trying to remedy.

HAC—

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

I'm sorry Mr. Jones, I'm going to have to cut you off just so everybody can get a chance to speak.

We do have your additional comments before us and if you can include them in any of your answers to the questions, that would be great.

[Fred Jones]

I'd be happy to.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

All right.

Mr. Belenky, via video conference, would you please go forward for five minutes?

[Professor Gregory Belenky, Research Professor, Washington State University, As an Individual]

Thank you, ma'am.

I do research in sleep and human performance. I work primarily now with the commercial airlines in the United States, specifically United Airlines. We study sleep and performance in what we call the operational environment, among pilots flying commercial flights.

As the gentleman just said, fatigue is fatigue; pilots are pilots. They are human beings, and they fatigue; it really is the same thing. The physiology, though, needs to be understood and used to support meaningful and useful regulations.

The sleep-related factors that affect performance are: time awake, an obvious one; time of day—there is the circadian rhythm in performance and alertness, with lowest performance and highest drowsiness and tendency to fall asleep occurring in the small hours of the morning, so time of day is important—and time on task, leading to acute fatigue relieved by time off task. These three things are common across humanity among fatigue issues.

In commercial aviation, flights can be scheduled at any time of the day or night, often with one flight then giving way, after a recovery period, to another, and so on. We have in the U.S. focused on regulatory schemes that are to a degree one-size-fits-all, but recently we've moved away from that and are looking not only at fixed regulations but at systems by which one could adapt and exist “outside the regulatory envelope”—this is the term we use.

This is called fatigue risk management. One establishes a preliminary safety case that a flight is safe, usually by using mathematical models or historical experience, depending upon where your interests lie. Once you've established in a preliminary way that it looks as though it will be all right, you then make measurements in flight of the active pilots, particularly at top of descent, when the most critical phases of flight typically occur. Once one demonstrates that there is equivalence in safety between “in compliance with the regulations” flights and the exception, the non-traditional flight, then one can fly that flight and do periodic data assessments to make sure one is safe.

Among critical things, in general in our measurements, the longer the flight the safer, because there is more sleep opportunity, and the more sleep people get.... We think in terms here of four-pilot crews with only two required in the cockpit at any given time during cruise.

Another critical thing is time of day. One should avoid, if one can, takeoffs and landings in the small hours of the morning, especially between 4 a.m. and 6 a.m.

There is one more thing, if you will indulge me. One very useful intervention in counteracting fatigue in four-person or in two- or three-pilot crews is whether in-flight cockpit napping is sanctioned. This was pioneered in the U.S. in studies at NASA but then not adopted because of what we call the Jay Leno effect: would they laugh? This is now done all over the world, except in the U.S.

I think this is good by way of introduction. I'd be happy to take comments and questions and join in discussion.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Thank you very much, Mr. Belenky.

Mr. DaCosta, take five minutes, please.

[Carlos DaCosta, Canadian Airline Coordinator, International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers in Canada]

Thank you.

I will cut my introduction a little short. My name is Carlos DaCosta, responsible for transportation across Canada. The IAM is the largest union in the air transport sector in both Canada and North America. We represent over 50,000 members in Canada, 20,000 of whom work in the aviation, aerospace, and air transport sector. We represent over 500,000 members in North America.

In the airport security sector, we represent the majority of the pre-board screening officers in Canada, including those in the Pacific region and in both airports in Toronto, who provide safety and security screening to the travelling public on behalf of CATSA and Transport Canada as well as other security services in the perimeter of the airport. In the ground handling sector, we represent workers across Canada at such companies as Air Canada, Air Transat, and Air Labrador, just to name a few. We represent a lot of members in this industry.

We welcome the opportunity to appear before the TRAN committee to express some of our recent concerns. This represents the view of IAM members who have been surveyed across the country. There are two areas that we will be raising. The first one will be the safety management systems, or SMS, under the control of Transport Canada. The second one will be concerns regarding airport pre-boarding screening under the control of CATSA and Transport Canada.

On the first one, I was going to get into a brief bit about SMS. Basically, according to Transport Canada regulations, the industry is required to put a safety management system in place as an extra layer of protection to help save lives. When this was first implemented, we were very critical of the program, and we had some serious concerns about how it would turn out.

Moving fast-forward to today, we looked at the SMS process and broke it down into four different areas. There's the reporting stage, where a technician comes forward and reports an incident. The second stage would be the investigation carried out by the company. The third one would be the resolution process to try to address the issue raised. The last one would be the communications stage, whereby all parties to the complaint are notified as to what took place.

Unfortunately, there are too many problems. We found that in certain companies in certain areas of the country—not all of them—too many problems are occurring during this process. For some of them we're getting reports that there does not appear to be efficient tracking of SMS items submitted, and they're not being followed up properly and reported. A lot of times we find that the process seems to disappear or go silent at the second step of the process.

The other complaint we're getting is that there appears to be a lack of resolutions and communications implemented by the companies in certain areas. That's what the mechanics who report these incidents are finding. They're not getting the proper follow-up. As a recommendation, we're asking that Transport Canada conduct more inspections on a more regular basis. Perhaps they can start to uncover some of these situations and put corrections in place.

The second item is the whistle-blower protection under the SMS process, which we find is a bit on the weak side. We found it very alarming to be told by many of our members that they do not feel confident with the process. It's not in every company and in every province, but we're finding that in British Columbia, Ontario, and Quebec there seems to be a higher rate of concern where members do not trust the system. We're getting various reasons. They're concerned for their well-being in the company and so on.

However, in Alberta there were some issues in the past where members finally had enough in one company in one location. They approached Transport Canada inspectors. The inspectors went into the workplace. We're told that as of today, everything seems to be running smoothly. Here's one example of where Transport Canada did intervene. They brought both sides together, the company and the workers. Whatever they did there seemed to work, because they have no complaints whatsoever. We're recommending that Transport Canada address this issue by creating a better atmosphere for workers to report safety hazards.

We're also asking if perhaps Transport Canada should be looking at a confidential survey to see what kind of atmosphere exists out there and if indeed there is a large problem where many technicians are not reporting situations.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Thank you very much, Mr. DaCosta. Whatever critical points remain, I'm sure with the questions you'll have a chance to get those answers in.

Mr. Histon.

[Jonathan Histon, Adjunct Professor, University of Waterloo and Lecturer, University of Western Ontario, As an Individual]

Thank you.

Good afternoon, and thank you for this invitation to appear before the committee.

My name is Jonathan Histon and I have been involved in the study of aviation human factors and aviation safety for just under 17 years. I currently lecture in aviation safety and aviation human factors in the commercial aviation management program at Western University in London, Ontario, and hold an adjunct appointment as an assistant professor in the department of systems design engineering at the University of Waterloo. In addition, throughout my career, I have consulted with airline, air traffic control, and equipment manufacturers, amongst other organizations.

My expertise is in the area of human factors, or the relationship between human operators, technology, and system design. As director of the Humans in Complex Systems lab, I have led projects examining airspace design and its effect on complexity, UAV integration into controlled airspace, simulator use in air traffic controller training, and the use of flight data to identify emerging human factors challenges.

From my perspective, the philosophy behind the core of Canada's aviation safety approach, safety management systems, reflects what I understand to be the best practices in the safety literature, namely, a focus on continuous improvement, data collection and data-driven decision-making, and the fostering of a learning culture that understands mistakes and errors will occur, and the most important thing, how the system responds, mitigates, and corrects.

System is a key word. I think it is most valuable to think of safety as an emergent property, something that emerges from the interactions between the many parts of a system. The task of getting an airplane or helicopter off the ground and to its destination safely is one that requires contributions from an immense range of talent: mechanics, controllers, ground crew, flight crew, and all the broader systems behind them.

The design of how all these parts interrelate and work together is critical to establishing effective defences that prevent catastrophic situations from occurring. Perhaps most importantly, a system perspective helps move attention away from errors made by individuals and directs it towards the broader context those individuals are operating in. It forces us to question how the system could be improved for the future.

I want to use my remaining time to briefly raise some key challenges that I see facing the industry. One of the critical challenges that many, if not all, organizations face is what is termed in the literature as procedural drift, practical drift, or normalization of deviance. In a short form, these terms capture the observation that how work actually is done is often quite different from how it should be done according to written procedure.

The difference is usually a consequence of the multiple pressures workers and managers face: time pressure, equipment malfunctions, poor or repurposed design in terms of equipment, and just changing conditions. It's a complex problem and I'm not here to offer easy solutions. Introducing more rules or stricter penalties with the well-intentioned goal of increasing accountability and deterrence run the risk of creating adversarial relationships, creating an atmosphere of blame and cover-up, and are not long-term solutions if the underlying pressures created by the systems design aren't addressed.

This leads me to a second challenge: preserving and enhancing the ability of organizations to observe their own performance through the collection and protection of safety data. Processes we've just heard about, such as confidential reporting systems, immunity protocols, and operational data analysis can provide key insights, including helping to identify cases of normalization of deviance. But collecting such data also requires a lot of trust, as you just heard. That trust is that the data collected won't be used for punishment or otherwise misused for non-safety purposes.

I think data collection can be particularly challenging in organizations that do not have the scale to support the processes that the big airlines, as one example, have. Confidential reporting systems are great in theory, but may not be all that confidential in a very small operation. Across all organizations, however, I firmly believe that the more an organization knows about where its vulnerabilities are, where mistakes are being made, the better that organization can adapt and respond.

A final challenge that I'll direct your attention towards is determining how to assess training needs in a rapidly changing technological environment. New technologies are coming, whether in automated ground service vehicles at airports or new autopilot modes. There are a lot of things that are going to be changing. New technologies and new forms of automation will change training needs and raise questions such as how proficient operators have to be using the automation, and also when the automation isn't available, in non-automated operations. Are there legacy training requirements that are no longer appropriate, and has due consideration been given to the skill foundations built by that legacy training?

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Mr. Histon, I'm sorry. I have to cut you off. Members have a lot of questions.

Ms. Block.

[Kelly Block, Conservative, Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek, SK]

I want to thank all our witnesses joining us today, not only for the testimony that we're hearing today. I also want to thank members from the industry who have made the effort to meet with members of Parliament, over the last number of months, to raise the issue around the recently issued notice of intent and some of the concerns around it, which I believe fuelled a desire to put forward a motion to have a study like this. I want to thank you for that.

Mr. Jones, I want to return to your opening remarks. I know there was quite a bit you didn't get to because of the time that each one of you has. I want to speak to the statement you made in your opening remarks, which was, “These new regulations, however, are not proportional to the risk and will serve only to put our services beyond the reach of Canadians in many areas”. You went on to say that “the proposed changes will erode safety, not improve it”.

I really would like to give you an opportunity to expand on those observations in your comments.

[Fred Jones]

The proposal as written doesn't adequately address the helicopter industry's circumstances. A pilot is a pilot, but the same underlying fatigue issue can be addressed differently, based on the industry sector and the industry's circumstances. I and our association would argue that the current rules are such a monumental departure from the status quo that they have the potential to affect currency for pilots and to affect the experience level of pilots used in our industry.

At its heart, this issue is about regulations that are proportional to the risk of this issue, and we've argued that the Minister of Transport should wait for this committee to complete its deliberations and for the TSB to complete its air taxi study to find out, from those two sources, how big this issue is.

[Kelly Block, Conservative, Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek, SK]

You stated that earlier in your comments, and so with the issuing of the notice of intent, it's my understanding that once these draft regulations are gazetted there will be an opportunity for a comment period. Do you believe that comments made during that time won't have any sort of significant impact on the draft regulations as proposed?

[Fred Jones]

Thank you. There are two issues I'd like to raise. One is that there has been very little departure by the department from the principles that were articulated in the working group report from a few years ago, so they have steadfastly proceeded down this road, in spite of advice from the Helicopter Association of Canada and others. That's one point.

The second point is that, once these regulations are published in Gazette , part I, it's been our experience that there's usually very little change made to them going forward after Gazette , part I; they're tweaked. Now is the time to make any changes, and particularly any significant changes, not post-Gazette , part I, because there is too much of an investment of time, effort, and drafting. The process has taken us years to get this far.

[Kelly Block, Conservative, Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek, SK]

Okay. Thank you for that.

You've stated that a pilot is a pilot and fatigue is fatigue, that it's something that has been stated. I'm wondering if you could comment a little further on that. Will the new regulations affect different areas of Canada differently? Will the experiences of different Canadian helicopter pilots and their passengers be affected distinctly by these new regulations?

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Give a short answer, Mr. Jones.

[Fred Jones]

All right. I'll try my best.

They will radically affect remote operations, service to aboriginal communities, the mining industry, and the oil and gas producers. They will significantly affect the type of service they receive. I would argue that, in some cases, they will affect service that's available to some communities altogether.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Thank you very much.

I'm holding everyone to five minutes in order to give everyone their opportunity.

Go ahead, Mr. Badawey.

[Vance Badawey, Liberal, Niagara Centre, ON]

Just quickly, I did take note, Mr. Histon, of the comment you made about how work is done versus how work should be done. That's a great point. The only way we can move forward with recommendations is to work with folks like you and those who are in the business getting their hands dirty and greasy, who have wrenches in their hands, and so on.

I'm thinking out loud here a bit to try to get some input from you folks. Protocols need to be established. Obviously it's one thing to have regulations and things on paper but it's more important to have those protocols in place that we can apply to our daily jobs. Strategic measures followed by ongoing performance measures are critical. Again, it's the folks on the floor, working on the planes with their hands, who can best establish that.

It's somewhat déjà vu because we discussed this during the Bill C-10 deliberations as well with respect to creating performance areas, clusters, centres of excellence to ensure that this work gets done in a proper manner vis-à-vis protocols being put in place.

What are your thoughts on that process? I'm trying to be pragmatic. As I said earlier, our intent is to come forward with recommendations and implement those recommendations or ask the minister to implement those recommendations, so what are your thoughts on the comments made?

[Jonathan Histon]

I want to emphasize it is important to have procedures written down. It is important, as you said, to have those protocols put in place. When it comes to assessing whether things are being done safely, it is insufficient to simply review paper documents. This doesn't necessarily need to be a regulatory action, but there is a need that somewhere in the process, somewhere in the system, there is a culture of checking up on how we are doing and whether we have drifted away from what we said we were going to be doing.

There would be very good, practical reasons why that occurs. This is not people being nefarious, getting away with things. It's that things change. There can be competing directives and procedures and, as an organization, it is important that there be this continuous process of renewal and checking and re-establishing that the processes in place are safe. In my opinion, from my perspective, that's one of the great things that the philosophy of SMS tries to imbue into the culture of organizations. We can't just rest on our laurels. We can't just say we were safe last year and that's good enough. We have to keep on checking and be vigilant.

[Vance Badawey, Liberal, Niagara Centre, ON]

It's the culture of being proactive versus reactive.

Are there any other comments from folks?

[Carlos DaCosta]

I would have to agree with what Jonathan stated. We find that sometimes people change in their departments, and they need to be reminded of that culture because they are new to the system, and there needs to be a way you can measure whether those using the system feel comfortable using it or reporting situations.