Airlink problems have ‘minimal’ effect on cargo arm

The grounding of the 14 Jetstream 41 aircraft of SA Airlink’s 41-strong fleet has had only a minimal effect on cargo movement, according to Alwyn Rautenbach, MD of Airlink Cargo. “For us, there was very little impact,” he told FTW. “The J41 is a small aircraft with only a small cargo-carrying capacity. “Anyway, the airline has replaced these missing aircraft with larger planes, although the schedule frequency has been reduced.” The suspension of the airworthiness certificates of the 14 aircraft by the SA Civil Aviation Authority (SACAA) at midnight on Wednesday December 20 came after four Airlink planes had been involved in incidents since September 2009, and the airworthiness of the fleet could not be guaranteed. The SACAA inspection of the first four airplanes has started – and FTW is led to believe that the certificates of these airplanes could soon be reinstated. The suspension was triggered by an incident on December 20 when smoke was seen coming from one of the engines of an Airlink J41 that was set to take off from Nelspruit. The oil pressure was also low. According to the SACAA, the problems were similar to those experienced by the plane that went down in Durban in September – an incident in which the pilot eventually died in hospital, with the two other crew members and a bystander on the ground also injured. The reason for the Durban accident, said the SACAA accident report, was because “the engine had suffered a catastrophic failure due to a fatigue failure of the second stage rotating air seal”. The problem is that this failure in these Honeywell engines is not new. The SACAA told FTW that “this kind of failure appears to be the 13th known similar cause of failure of this type of engine”. Meantime, the result of the report findings in the Durban incident saw the SACAA making the following interim safety recommendation to the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). “The FAA should require Honeywell Aerospace to expedite efforts to produce an engineering solution to the problem of second stage turbine rotating air seal failures on Honeywell TPE331-14G/H engines,” said the authority.