Missinippi Airways' AOC suspended - 22 Oct 2011

[The Old Fogducker]

Doc:

"Essential Service" is not a concept in TC wth respect to an AOC Doc. For labour contract service, a company may have beenable to write that term into a contract and thereby be designated as an essential service for the purposes of labour negotiations. However, as a concept, that is generally only applicable to government entities IE designating a certain percentage of nurses at a hospital so that if they withdraw services in support of contract negotiations, so patients aren't dying over a 3% wage increase.It can also be designated as such by an act of Parliament such as was done in the case of Air Canada's FAs which set them to binding arbitration ... sort of the idea of "Too big to allow them to fail."

Your question about the concept of suspending the AOC of the OPP isn't at all out of the question. In actuality, if a problem were found which required correction because there was a clear falling below the requirements of the regs, generally the management of such entities such as the RCMP Air Division, OPP, various Provincial Air Services like the forestry section of Ontario, provincial air ambulance services, etc will fix a problem immediately rather than engaging "piss up a rope" style arguments with Transport when the AOC is on the line.

For example, lets say that a Province holds an AOC under CAR 703 to operate a King Air 350 to move people and goods in support of fire suppression operations which are billed to some other section of the government for cost recovery, and as such fall under the pilot training requirements of CASS 723.98 (10) which very specifically lays out the minimum excersizes which must be covered in an aircraft based training program. If, during a PVI .... or spot inspection .... the training records show that while the minimum flight time had been flown .... (about 5 hours is typical COM minimum for a turbine powered presurized aircraft) ... but only about 1/3rd of the required items from the CASS had been covered, the pilot isn't qualified. Here's a link to the reference .... http://www.tc.gc.ca/eng/civilaviation/r ... tm#723a_98 scroll down to (10) for the list of mandatory items.

Upon discovering this insufficiency, the pilot is immediately removed from the line and grounded until the missing items are completed. Somebody else on staff will do the flying until Biggles gets the required items flown off. If nobody on staff has all the required items on their training files ... well, now its a case of "Houston, we have a problem." Then all of the pilots are grounded and outside expertise has to be drawn in to act as "seed" to be the qualified training pilot to train at least one guy who then becomes the trainer for everyone else on staff.

While "Bison Joe Schmoe Airline and Pizza Delivery Company" may get their back up and argue about "Tin horn government jerks" and make a huge deal out out of the finding, pledging to taking the grounding "to the highest court in the land," the flight dept at any reasonable company will immediately get down to work and train that pilot with the missing exercises and all who follow, in accordance with the requirements of the CASS and be done with it.

Failure to do so, will mean an AOC suspension for unqualified staff, regardless of the political profile of the company. There have been some pretty high profile AOCs suspended for short periods, but are reinstated within a couple of days because the "immediate threat" problems have been fixed while some other operator subs the flying for the suspended one and a couple of days later are back flying again as if nothing happened. Behind the scenes though ... a whole lot is happening.

In my example of "Joe Schmoe" getting his back up and puffing out his tail while doing a bunch of hissing and spitting, well, he will have talked himself into a longer term suspension because he has chosen a route which didn't direct the total capabilities of the operation to addressing and fixing the problem of a blatant insufficiency.

Bottom line of this Doc ... there is no such thing as "essential service" in the CARs or the CASS, or the Aeronautics Act ... just check the definitions sections of each of those documents, and you'll come up bare. It is possible that the term was worked into your labour contract between the employer and CALPA as a condition of CALPA certification, or a deal on wages, or who knows what ... in other words, they gave up the right to strike in exchange for something that the negotiators thought was a worthwhile consideration.

The Old Fogducker .... again Doc, no charge for the consultation, generally my clients would have paid about $500 to learn that info. I'd better stop posting real information here, I'm doing myself out of business

[Doc]

Old Fog....thanks for that. Cheers