TomVexille
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Seems like a lax attitude to safety from Akbar Al Baker.
Runway overruns 'happen quite often': Qatar Airways CEO Akbar Al Baker
Akbar Al Baker, the chief executive of Qatar Airways, which is doubling its flights to and from Australia next year, has claimed runway overrun incidents like one that damaged one of his airline's Boeing 777s upon take-off from Miami in September "happen quite often".
A preliminary report into the Miami incident by the Qatar Civil Aviation Authority this week found the runway overrun left a 46 centimetre tear in the aircraft's fuselage, which breached the pressure vessel as well as numerous dents and scratches in the airframe with 18 square metres of damaged skin.
There were 90 individual areas of damage requiring assessment and fixing, as well as some damage to a metal guard on the left landing gear. In addition, there was damage to three of the runway approach lights at Miami International Airport which the aircraft clipped upon take-off before completing its 13.5 hour flight to Doha, Qatar and arriving with damage to the airframe.
The report found the aircraft, with four pilots in the coughpit, had mistakenly taken off using only part of the runway as they entered via a taxiway due to a misreading of information on a tablet computer. Around 1000 metres of the runway was behind them, and the recorded data from the aircraft showed they overran the runway by nearly 300 metres upon take-off but flew on to Doha, apparently oblivious to the damage.
But Mr Al Baker, rather than taking responsibility for the incident and committing to fixing the airline's procedures, on Wednesday told reporters it was the fault of air traffic control rather than the pilots - in direct contradiction of the report.
According to Flightglobal, he also said: "Such kind of incidents happen quite often, either it is a tail strike on the runway or it is contact with the landing lights."
Runway overruns 'happen quite often': Qatar Airways CEO Akbar Al Baker