The Tribune

IN 2018, a plane crashed off the Berry Islands. The pilot – who was unqualified – and the four passengers on board all survived, but the incident highlighted an issue in the aviation industry known as “hacking”.

The pilot in that incident did not have a valid licence – only having a private pilot licence that had expired in 2011, and a medical certificate that expired in 2016.

The accident report that followed showed the pilot never made maintenance records for his plane available to investigators.

Days later, a fatal crash off South Andros killed six people.

At the time, Randy Butler, then CEO of SkyBahamas, talked of how a shortage of inspection officers meant that hackers knew how to beat “the system”. They could spot the inspectors, and off they would go in their planes to avoid being questioned. As for the inspectors, Mr Butler said: “They would notice pilots who were making too many flights per day, per week or per month and they did nothing. They have to go further and actually detain planes and they aren’t doing that.”

In 2019, new regulations were to be rolled out to tackle the issue – with Captain Charles Beneby, in his role as director general of the Bahamas Civil Aviation Authority, saying at the time that “as a matter of urgency, we have to do something about it”.

There was much talk that the days of hackers were numbered.

Last week, two people were killed in a crash off New Providence.

Emma Williams and Allen Russell died in the crash. Four more people were injured.

The pilot in this case appears to have also been a hacker, seemingly without the appropriate licence to carry fee-paying passengers.

There are further questions about what happened leading up to the crash, with reports circulating on social media that the pilot hoped to land at San Andros, but the lights were off on the runway. The pilot headed back to Nassau – and didn’t make it.

The investigation is under way and will answer such questions as the above – but it will not answer why there appears to still be a market for hackers, and why people who do not have the correct licences to fly are being allowed to do so.

If you get a taxi, you expect him to have his driving licence and his car taxed. If you hop on a jitney, you expect the same. Board a cruise ship, and you expect all the legal paperwork to be in place. Why would the small plane industry be any different?

More to the point, if a hacker does not have the correct paperwork, how can you be sure they have paid the correct attention to the maintenance of the plane?

In the case of last week’s crash, the plane involved was a Piper Aztec more than half a century old – maintenance is an essential.

As more details emerge, and we learn more about the crash, we must not lose sight of the bigger picture.

Is this a one-off case? We surely do not presume that to be so. If a pilot does not have the right licence, how does this slip through the inspection net? Or is our inspection net simply not doing what it is supposed to do?

As families mourn after another fatal plane crash, we must do all we can to ensure there is not another tragedy still to come. And another.

We would hope the Minister of Aviation would have strong words to say on the subject.