CIAS crew ‘would return to work if bosses left’
MOST of the 14 crew who left CI Air Search recently are prepared to go back, but only if there are changes at the very top of the organisation, said one of the two men sacked by the service following internal disagreements.
But CIAS has said that it has now recruited additional crew and it continues to be contacted by people interested in volunteering.
The dismissals arose following claims by a senior crew member of bullying and intimidation, which were investigated by an independent panel who found no evidence to support the allegations.
James Ridout was one of those accused, but said he never saw anything to back up the claims.
He joined CIAS in 2008 and was acting as observer on the day that the former aircraft Lion’s Pride crash-landed in a Jersey field in November 2013.
A subsequent investigation by the Air Accident Investigation Branch found several weaknesses within the operational procedures and practices in use by CIAS.
There followed a campaign to raise £800,000 to buy a new Islander.
Mr Ridout said that when a new lifeboat is brought to the island by the RNLI, a group usually accompanies it to help train the crew on the differences between it and the previous vessel.
But there was no training crew with the new CIAS Islander when it arrived in 2019.
‘They [senior crew] said, “It’s an Islander, it’ll be the same as the others we’ve had,” but I was saying that it wasn’t because there were lots of different aspects to it,’ he said.
When the aircraft arrived, despite being new, Mr Ridout said it was ‘in a very poor state’ and there were several obvious problems.
‘One thing was that the compass was mounted upside down,’ he said.
‘These things were all “snagging” but because we had nobody showing us we had to work it out ourselves.’
An Initial Airworthiness Survey by Guernsey aircraft registry 2-Reg concluded: ‘This aircraft and its documentation have been surveyed and found to be unsatisfactory for the purpose of a recommendation for the issue of the Certificate of Airworthiness by the Bailiwick of Guernsey DCA [director of civil aviation].’
Among the 17 issues found, many of which related to lack of necessary documentation, was that there were ‘pyrotechnics’ (flares) with an expiry date of December 2017, the liferaft was loose behind one of the seats and blocked access to a fire extinguisher, and there was damage to both sides of the tail plane leading edge, although there was no record available of this or of any corrective measures.
Mr Ridout and another crew member had prepared a new training programme for the crew but not long before it was completed, Mr Ridout said he heard that it was being dropped since it was considered to be ‘over the top’.
Subsequent arguments led to Mr Ridout and pilot Mike Tidd being accused of bullying a senior staff member and they were suspended by the CIAS trustees, pending an independent investigation panel.
