(Trinidad Express) Captain Ian Brunton, the former CEO of Caribbean Airlines (CAL), said he was doubtful the company would have breached safety standards with their pilots.
He said people should await the outcome of impending investigations.
A veteran pilot, Brunton said it would not be fair to the airline for him to comment on the incident.
“I know the standards of safety at CAL are very high; I mean, it is a business, but the standards of safety I am very comfortable with. I have been so intimate with it over so many years, I’d find it difficult to believe they would be throwing all that history of 70 years of safety away to push the pilots to the limit. I’ll quite be surprised but I don’t know,” he said.
Brunton said citizens should allow for the full investigation to be completed before speculating.
This investigation, he said, will include the National Transportation Safety Board, the US-based independent board that investigates all accidents and incidents that have anything to do with transport in US; the Guyana and T&T aviation authorities (the Airports Authority of Trinidad and Tobago); the manufacturer of the Boeing 737; and CAL themselves.
“All those parties will thoroughly investigate everything surrounding the accident and everything that leads up to it. I am very confident we should wait for the investigation to conclude,” he told the Sunday Express, adding the speculation could be very damaging.
He said T&T should not go the “armchair critic” way where people with little knowledge of the facts become judge, jury and executioner and prejudice the perspective.
Asked if the incident will have a negative impact, he said: “I think this could be a positive for us. We were very fortunate there was no loss of life because that airplane could have burnt so easily, and it’s fire that kills people in this sort of incident…but it says a lot for the crew and the airplane that they were able to ensure there was no fire.”
He said the incident, an airplane involved in an accident off the compound of the airport, is the biggest fear of most pilots since it makes it difficult for emergency services to attend quickly to a situation.
But he said the lucky thing was that two main pieces of equipment on the plane—the digital flight recorder and the cockpit voice recorder—were not damaged and would help to supply investigators with a very detailed account of the incident.
Contacted for comment yesterday, Trinidad and Tobago Airline Pilots Association chairman John O’Brien, himself a pilot at CAL, said he preferred not to make any comment at this time, deferring a statement to next week.
