NU Online News Service, July 13, 8:30 a.m. EDT
The final report on the crash of the Air France flight that took the lives of the crew and 228 passengers will not impact rates, but will bring pilot training to the attention of underwriters, says a broker from Willis Group Holdings.
In an interview with PC360, Garrett Hanrahan, president of Willis Global Aerospace, says the crash of Air France flight 447 into the Atlantic in 2009 has already been priced into the airline insurance market, so there will not be any additional pricing impact now that the report has been released.
Hanrahan notes that last year the airline insurance market "performed very, very well," and all indicators are that it should be another profitable year barring a major disaster.
He says 2011 was the "most profitable year in a long time" and capacity remains abundant.
"The airlines are resilient and can learn from mistakes to keep this from happening again," says Hanrahan.
In its final report, France's aviation investigators, the BEA (Bureau d'Enquêtes et d'Analyses), said the combination of instrument malfunction and pilot error resulted in the Airbus A330-203 stalling in flight and crashing into the Atlantic with all aboard.
The BEA says the pilots were thrown off when the Pitot probes that measure airspeed became clogged with ice crystals and disconnected the autopilot. With the plane in manual control, the pilots became confused from conflicting instrument readings and ignored stall warnings.
For reasons that may have to do with one of the instruments, the pilot kept the nose of the plane pointed up, which caused the stall.
Before they realized that the plane was in a stall and losing altitude, the plane crashed into the Atlantic, killing all.
It took over a year before investigators recovered the black boxes and were able to reassemble what happened on the flight.
Hanrahan says that the report will cause underwriters to ask questions about pilot training, but he adds the airline industry has a history of learning from mistakes and "making sure that it does not happen again."
He says when it comes to safety, airlines do not compete with each other and openly share information. And while there may be greater scrutiny of Airbus and its training, Hanrahan believes the company and the industry will do everything necessary to avoid a repeat of the Air France tragedy.
"This [information] will be shared with the wider marketplace to make sure that other airlines benefit from what was learned from this horrible accident," says Hanrahan.
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