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Safety call after mid-air plunge

The UK Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) has issued new safety recommendations after an easyJet Boeing 737 nose-dived nearly 9,000 ft while on a post-maintenance check flight.
The report by the air investigators has called for a tightening of procedures after it was discovered that a “confusion between the two pilots” resulted in the plunge before control was recovered.
According to the report, the co-pilot had received “no formal training” to conduct such a flight, while various elements of the check “demonstrated practices which would have been deemed unacceptable in normal operations”.
The report said there was “a lack of any kind of communication” between the pilots and the two observers on the public transport aircraft for more than one-and-a-quarter minutes when things had started going wrong on the flight.
It added that the co-pilot “only realised something was wrong” when the captain made an emergency Possible Assistance Needed (PAN) call – one stage down from a Mayday call.
The report also found that one of the observers was seated on a storage cupboard behind the captain’s seat and was not restrained by a safety harness. The incident had happened in skies west of Norwich, Norfolk, on the afternoon of January 12, 2009.
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