Scenic Aviation defends safety record

Tuesday, May 26, 1998 | 9:34 a.m.

The president of a Southern Nevada air tour operation under Federal Aviation Administration scrutiny believes his company has been unfairly criticized in the media for an unsolved fatal accident and a mishap in Monticello, Utah, that injured a pilot and a passenger.

David Young, president of Scenic Aviation Inc., a North Las Vegas subsidiary of SkyWest Airlines, based in St. George, Utah, said professional jealousy in a highly competitive industry was the motivation behind what he calls a smear campaign against his company's Page, Ariz., operation.

The FAA met with Scenic earlier this week in North Las Vegas to review the company's safety record in the wake of the incident this week in Monticello, where a pilot encountered wind shear on his final approach to the airport.

Young said the pilot of the Cessna 172 was commended for being able to land the plane and avoid serious injury. A German tourist suffered a cut over his eye in the accident, Young said.

"We told the FAA we felt the pilot did a magnificent job of avoiding a worse situation," Young said. "The aircraft that landed in front of him landed safely and our pilot encountered wind shear, which is invisible and impossible to detect. He managed to fly around it, but caused substantial damage to the aircraft."

Young said the FAA's inquiry deals strictly with the company's operation in Page, where Scenic flies planes carrying 10 passengers or less. Scenic's North Las Vegas air tour operation involves planes that carry 10 or more passengers.

The Page operation involves about 20 six- to eight-passenger single-engine Cessna planes and three nine-passenger models. Scenic flies air tours over Monument Valley and some charters from Page.

The North Las Vegas Scenic operation involves flying 54 two-engine, 19-passenger Twin Otter planes on tours over the Grand Canyon.

The Salt Lake Tribune first reported this week that a team of eight FAA inspectors met with Scenic. It quoted an FAA spokesman as saying inspectors reviewed "the gamut of maintenance and operations of the company."

Another team of about five inspectors plans to travel soon to airports in Monticello and Page where several Scenic mishaps have occurred, the Tribune reported.

But Young said maintenance is not at issue with the FAA.

The accident that has caused the greatest amount of grief for Scenic was last October's fatal crash of a nine-passenger Cessna 208 in southwestern Colorado in which a pilot and eight passengers died.

"We still have no idea what caused that accident," Young said. "Investigators are looking into icing (on the wings), but it could have been any number of things. We are as mystified as anyone. It was a former military pilot who had thousands of hours (flying experience). There have been (Boeing) 737 accidents where they have never found the cause."

Young said the accident hit the tiny community of Page hard because all eight passengers were businessmen from there.

Two other Page accidents resulting in minor injuries to passengers also have been revisited following the Monticello crash. Young said Scenic's safety record actually is excellent: there have been those two accidents involving minor injuries out of 2 million takeoffs and landings since 1967; plus the Monticello incident and the fatal Colorado crash.

The Tribune reported FAA spokesman Mitch Barker said the FAA could not divulge details of his meeting with Scenic officials. "It was a wide-ranging discussion of pilot training and maintenance operations of the company."

The upcoming FAA visits to the Monticello and Page airports are to determine whether Scenic pilots need additional training to deal with the extreme weather conditions of the Colorado Plateau, Barker told the Tribune.

"Those are quite windy areas," he said. "There may be other weather-related things to be reproduced for training. Maybe there's a way to put the airport's conditions in the (flight-simulation) training for the Scenic pilots."

Young insists Scenic has a good rapport with the FAA.

"They commended us for the way we've operated," Young said. "We run a damn professional operation, but we're paying the penalty for being the largest air tour operation. We're the most profitable and the biggest and we've been in business for 30 years, so there's a lot of jealousy out there."

Young said he didn't think it was coincidental the company is enduring bad publicity at a time a Salt Lake City-based competitor is starting operations at the Page airport.

In addition to the reports on the FAA's stepped-up scrutiny of Scenic, the Tribune reported a review of FAA documents by the newspaper found that the Scenic plane involved in a crash this week was the subject of two FAA fines a few years ago.

According to FAA documents, the same plane that crashed Sunday was found in 1994 to have an air traffic control transponder that was improperly tested and inspected. Scenic also was found to lack the equipment for testing the device. For those violations, the FAA assessed a $2,000 fine, the Tribune reported.

A year earlier, FAA inspectors had found the same Cessna 172 had been operated in excess of the time required for inspection of its seat rails and its ignition switches. Fines for those violations totaled $15,000.