Insel Air: dogged by bad luck

WILLEMSTAD — This week started off awkwardly and expensive for the Curaçao airline company Insel Air due to the human misjudgment of a dispatcher on Sunday and technical problems on Monday.

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Apart from the fact that the company could not spare its passengers the inconvenience, the company is confronted with costs it would not have made under regular circumstances. Co-workers of a dispatcher on Curaçao had driven a MD80 from Insel Air against a huge airco-wagon during the push back on Sunday. The damage to both wings of this aircraft was such that it had to stay on the ground for repair. Passengers with the final destination St. Maarten, San Juan or elsewhere, had to be patient while Insel Air provided them with a meal and refreshment. However, yesterday it regarded the replacing aircraft that Insel Air had deployed for the damaged one, which had moods. After an excellent flight Curaçao-St. Maarten-San Juan-St. Maarten, the pilots noticed there were problems with the navigational wiring. As flying is not advisable in this case, all passengers (of whom some had been delayed since Sunday) had to disembark at St. Maarten and brought to hotels at the expense of Insel Air. The technicians flown in from Curaçao in great haste concluded that this wiring problem had to solved on Curaçao. After a temporary solution was provided, the aircraft had started its flight to Hato without passengers.

Suddenly the light indicating one of the wheel doors was not closed had lit up. These doors close the space where the wheels disappear to after take-off. If something is wrong there, the pilot will not know if he can count on his entire landing system. Conform protocol, the air traffic control on Curaçao was informed of the situation. The air traffic control also followed the safety protocol and called on the airport fire brigade and other emergency services to stand by.In the meantime, the technicians on board kept looking for the cause of the ‘door not closed’ report. Before the aircraft had arrived at Hato, these technicians successfully determined that it regarded a false alarm."No action was therefore required from the stand-by services when the Insel Air aircraft made a flawless normal landing", says director General and International Affairs, Edward Heerenveen. It was decided to replace all navigational wiring in the aircraft. The company put up with all additional costs for the highest possible safety on all flights. The airline company will pay for all repair costs of the damaged aircraft and for the care of passengers who were stranded due to this ‘airco-wagon incident’. These costs will be recovered later on from the insurance companies in question.

"This was an unforeseeable incident. We know that our work area is ‘aircraft unfriendly’ due to for example the high sea salt content, which is why we wash our aircrafts completely every day – including the engine – as we want to avoid the trouble sea salt could cause our aircraft", Heerenveen explains part of Insel Air’s far-reaching maintenance policy. He hopes he will not have to do without the two MD’s for too long. One expects that the MD80 damaged by the dispatcher will be able to make its first test flight today around noon. One hopes to deploy the aircraft immediately afterwards to collect all stranded passengers on St. Maarten – a fully booked flight with 152 passengers. The test flight of the second MD that had wiring problems should not take too long either.All passengers in question will receive a letter from the Insel Air management giving an explanation and offering apologies for the incidents of the past three days. Although the (European) rules for compensations with lengthy delays do not apply to local airline companies and do not become effective in case of technical problems, Insel Air is still considering making ‘a gesture’ towards its stricken clients.