No, You Don’t Really Want to Look into Airline Safety

So, Norwegian Air (at least the low-cost Ireland-based affiliate, which is, by the way, hemorrhaging money) is a low-cost no-frills airline with tempting teaser fares — fares that people actually seem to be using for leisure travel. Even when you add the extras, it can still be cheaper than the legacy airlines, but you need to be careful and shop around. The service isn’t terrible (at least according to many people), but when there’s a problem, things can be pretty bad — however, it’s unclear if the result is worse than with a legacy airline.

However, it’s also pushing the envelope of using corporate offshoring to avoid both Norwegian and U.S. labor laws. Norwegian Air might hire Bangkok-based crews through a Singapore-based agency (but not for transatlantic flights, apparently), or maybe also through a Cyprus-based agency (?).

This issue implicates the “open skies,” international law, and labor regulations, but what about safety? Who wants to go down the air safety rabbit hole?

Well, they do use Boeing directly for maintenance of their generally-new aircraft. Here’s an interesting thread on the issue.

But did you know you can just surf basically all airline incidents? Here’s one incident with Norwegian Air that gained some notoriety with in-the-know airline industry types. In short, there was a cock-up on takeoff that resulted in the pilots stopping the plane and shutting down the engines, but rather than do things correctly again, they quickly restarted the engines and took off. The cabin crew was left standing in the aisles and the plane did not properly pressurize. The flight only took about 45 minutes, and they flew low enough that they didn’t kill anyone (!), but the crew used oxygen and left the plane as soon as it landed.

One interesting detail is that the flight crew was from “Go2Sky,” a Slovakian charter service (I think) that also contracts with charter outfits like “Pro Sky.” So, Pro Sky arranges transport of the German national basketball team (for example), and Go2Sky provides the plane. Go2Sky was also apparently leasing, and would eventually buy, the Norwegian plane involved in the incident.

Some of the incident comments are along the lines of “ah, you see can’t trust those fools at Go2Sky,” but there’s nothing inherently wrong or uncommon about airlines outsourcing flight crews — American, United, etc., use low-paid pilots from SkyWest and Mesa Airlines.

Also, once you get into these kinds of incidents…well maybe if you fly you don’t want to get into the incidents. Here are a few recent samples from AeroInside:

-I’ve mentioned the British Air ancient 747 flying bus a few times now— well, here’s one that lost an engine taking off from Chicago.

-And here’s one where the crew just shouted “Trim!” shortly after takeoff, before returning to Boston.