Headlines
Germanwings fallout: Air NZ joins global airlines on new cockpit rules
Wellington, March 27
Air New Zealand on Friday
joined other global airlines in stipulating that two crew members would
have to be present at all times in the cockpit, amid allegations that a
co-pilot willfully crashed a passenger jet earlier this week, locking
the pilot out of the cockpit.
Prosecutors indicated on Thursday
that the co-pilot of Germanwings flight 4U 9525, en route from Barcelona
in Spain to Dusseldorf in Germany on Tuesday, deliberately made the
plane crash in the French Alps, killing all 150 people on board.
David
Morgan, Air New Zealand's chief flight operations and safety officer,
said the policy amendment meant that at least two crew members were now
required to be present at all times in each aircraft's cockpit, the News
Zealand Herald reported.
If one of two pilots operating a flight
needed to leave the cockpit for a short time, another crew member would
be required to be in the cockpit during the other's absence, the report
added.
The policy change was "effective immediately", Morgan
said, and followed a review of cockpit procedures in response to the
Germanwings disaster.
"The safety of our customers, staff and
aircraft is paramount and non-negotiable and this procedural change will
further strengthen our protocols and mitigate any risk posed by one
pilot becoming incapacitated while operating an aircraft," he said.
According
to an earlier report, a number of global airline companies like
Lufthansa Group, Air Berlin, Condor, TuiFly, Norwegian Air, Easyjet, Air
Canada and Icelandair have already agreed on tighter cockpit rules,
requiring two crew members to be present in the cockpit at all times, in
the wake of the Germanwings revelation.
Air New Zealand had its
own mid-air scare in May last year, when a co-pilot was locked out of
his cockpit for two minutes on a packed Trans-Tasman flight between
Perth and Auckland.
The captain did not respond to requests to
open the locked door, alarming the crew, after he and his first officer
were believed to have fallen out over a delayed take-off.
The
co-pilot eventually used an alternative method to gain entry to the
cockpit, which the airline did not detail for security reasons.
Both pilots were stood down after the incident, and their cabin crew offered counselling.