Airline fined £5,000 for flying faulty jet from Liverpool to New York

Aug 4 2008

A budget airline which flew a faulty jet 3,000 miles from Liverpool to New York after it had been struck by lightning, has been fined £5,000.

Despite knowing two engine pressure radio indicators (EPRs) were out of action, Globespan Airways Limited used some "optimistic interpretation" of the rules to allow the Boeing 757 to take off with 20 passengers.

As a result the crew were forced to manually adjust the throttle with the help of another gauge.

The failure was discovered hours before the incident on June 28 last year during an inbound flight from New York’s JFK airport to Liverpool.

Despite this the Edinburgh-based airline, which trades as FlyGlobeSpan, breached Civil Aviation regulations by declaring the aircraft "serviceable" to fly later that day and return to America via Knock in Ireland.

The company admitted two summonses under the Air Navigation Order 2005 of flying the plane without a valid certificate of air worthiness or a valid operator’s certificate.

Passing sentence at London’s Southwark Crown Court, Recorder James Curtis QC said the EPRs allowed a pilot to monitor the thrust of each engine. Although not "core" instrumentation - such data could be gleaned by using another type of gauge - it nevertheless provided an "extra layer of information" for the pilot.

"I am told and I am satisfied that the failure of the EPRs on this flight did not render the aircraft unsafe and did not in any way endanger the public who were flying on that aircraft.

"In the event ... that flight continued for some hours perfectly safely from JFK to Liverpool without any incident or difficulty. It rather placed extra burdens and pressures on the pilot and co-pilot to calculate manually the performance of the engines."

That meant "they were stretched more than ideally than they could have been in flying the plane safely, and fly safely they did".

The recorder said, on landing, a "proper and in-depth" investigation was carried out by the airline’s contract engineers, Storm Aviation. Unfortunately, they could neither identify the cause of the failure nor correct it.