Jetsgo Problems Ignored by Transport Canada

June 16, 2006
Jetsgo had repeated mechanical breakdowns, shoddy maintenance practices, inexperienced pilots and midair mishaps.

Transport Canada stood by while thousands of Canadians boarded Jetsgo planes amid a growing list of safety problems at the discount airline.

More than a year after the death of Jetsgo, Transport Canada insists it did the right thing in keeping the doomed airline flying and has not changed its procedures in light of the Jetsgo experience.

Jetsgo, which offered tickets as low as $1, had repeated mechanical breakdowns, shoddy maintenance practices, inexperienced pilots and midair mishaps.

Transport Canada, which is mandated to keep Canada's skies safe, knew of the problems, but for 2 1/2 years dismissed the troubles as the growing pains of a start-up operator.

Only after a near-crash in Calgary in January 2005 did it take tough action, but even after a special inspection the next month revealed serious trouble, the regulator continued to publicly tout the airline as "safe."

Today, Transport Canada is convinced it handled Jetsgo appropriately. "We followed our process and it worked," said spokesperson Lucie Vignola.

Interviews with former employees, incident reports filed with Transport Canada and the Transportation Safety Board, and internal government documents paint a picture of an airline so badly run that some considered a major accident inevitable.

The Jetsgo experience underscores some of the major findings that are part of an ongoing investigation into aviation safety by the Toronto Star, Hamilton Spectator and The Record of Waterloo Region. The probe has found a system struggling to keep up with the demands of higher passenger traffic and a disturbing number of mechanical problems.

Jetsgo was the brainchild of Quebec entrepreneur Michel Leblanc, who had run other carriers, including Royal Aviation and Quebec regional airline Intair. It started flying in June 2002 and was welcomed by Ottawa as proof airline competition was thriving in the wake of 9/11 and Air Canada's earlier takeover of Canadian Airlines. Jetsgo had 29 planes when it shut down for financial reasons.

Today, Leblanc still defends the airline. "This is highly regulated by Transport Canada and our system was approved by Transport Canada and was monitored by Transport Canada very closely, like every major airline that flies a lot of people, and rightfully so," he said.

Problems emerged early. Three months after the launch of the discount airline, sloppy maintenance forced an emergency landing in Toronto. The pilots noticed they were losing the hydraulic fluid that helps run aircraft systems, according to an incident report. Mechanics had installed a temporary hydraulic line with the wrong pressure rating, and it failed within two flights.

The airline fixed its procedures for hydraulic lines, but starting in the fall of 2003 failures became more frequent.

Two days in a row in mid-January 2004, leaking hydraulic fluid was again blamed as smoke and fumes poured into the cabin of a Jetsgo plane. It was the same plane that had the faulty hydraulic line installed in 2002.

Jetsgo also had repeated engine failures. In April 2004, a clogged engine oil filter forced an emergency landing in Winnipeg. The engine had been left in storage and didn't get a proper check when it was installed, according to a Transportation Safety Board report.

Then, four days before Christmas 2004, an engine on a Jetsgo plane that had just left Toronto for Mexico started to vibrate with flames coming out of it. The plane returned to Toronto.

Yet another plane had two emergency landings within three months caused by dropping oil pressure in the left engine. Cracked lines were blamed in both instances. After the second incident in March 2005, flight attendants were seen crying.

"I did feel by the end of it that at any moment we were going to have an evacuation or something," said Stefania Urbisci, a Jetsgo flight attendant. "It shouldn't be like that every day."

Dean Mandos, in charge of the company's operations at Pearson airport, admits "certain individual aircraft were problematic." And because the airline had no spare aircraft, there was pressure to keep them in the air. Mechanical faults were allowed to accumulate for repair later.

Leblanc argues it was the normal way to run an airline. "It's industry practice to defer aircraft defects and there's a way of doing it properly, legally, conservatively," Leblanc said. "If you did not have any single defect on an airplane, all the airplanes would be grounded tomorrow."

Mandos remembered pilots disagreeing over the safety of planes, with one refusing to take a flight, but another saying it was okay to fly.

Jetsgo's problems compounded as it expanded, adding planes and routes so quickly that it couldn't keep up with hiring and training.

"For some part of the hiring process, we had people without any jet experience at all that were occupying flying seats," said one senior Jetsgo pilot involved in pilot training.

Leblanc bristled when asked about inexperienced pilots. Before hanging up the phone, he said: "To ask the question is irresponsible. Which airline would dispatch an airplane with pilots that are not properly qualified?"

The incident that left other pilots shaking their heads and finally forced action on Jetsgo happened in January 2005. A plane landing in poor weather in Calgary slid off the runway, ran along the snow-covered grass and hit a runway sign before taking off again.

Transport Canada launched a "special inspection" of the airline over two weeks in mid-February 2005. What it found was so alarming that restrictions were slapped on Jetsgo even before the inspection was completed.

Jetsgo needed "a management organization capable of exercising operational control," the inspectors wrote. On March 8, 2005, a transport official told Leblanc that Jetsgo's operating certificate would be suspended April 9 unless problems were fixed. Among the grounds for the suspension were that "Jetsgo failed to maintain an adequate organizational structure" and "an adequate flight safety program."

Still, as far as Transport Canada was concerned, the public was not to be discouraged from flying Jetsgo. On March 10, 2005, just hours before Jetsgo shut itself down, Transport Canada's assistant deputy minister for safety and security, Marc Gregoire, recommended a response to an inquiring reporter. "Given the sensitivity of this now in the media, I would suggest we answer the question about safety more directly: 'Yes, it is safe to fly with Jetsgo now.'"

Vignola said Gregoire was merely reiterating a message she had already been sending out for some days. "Had there been something serious or something that was an immediate safety threat, then we simply would have suspended their operating certificate."

After the airline stopped flying, Transport Canada examined the company's maintenance practices.

Among 15 problems found:

A key maintenance document was more than a decade out of date, still reflecting practices when American Airlines operated the planes.

There were no engineering orders to demonstrate three safety orders relating to engines had been complied with.

There was no evidence that a quality assurance audit due in the latter half of 2004 was ever completed.

The review also uncovered a 2004 internal Jetsgo audit that found numerous examples of missing or inappropriate entries on maintenance release forms, the documents that allow a plane back into the air.

According to the newspapers' research, there were plenty of warnings that things weren't right at Jetsgo. An audit done by Transport Canada inspectors in November 2002 had found 23 "non-conformance items" that foreshadowed the chaos that would engulf the airline later. "Many of the findings seem to point to systemic deficiencies within Jetsgo's internal processes brought about by high demand on very limited management resources during start-up and growth."

But officials took the findings in stride, as nothing "significant ... for a start-up carrier," according to a Transport Canada document.

Looking back, Leblanc acknowledges Jetsgo wasn't perfect, but says nothing is. "We've had issues. Every airline has had issues."

But some of his 1,350 former employees say it was more than just a few issues. They feared a crash would happen.

"Thank God nothing happened," Urbisci now says. "It was a miracle."

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