Pilots Flood CAA With Info Requests Over Secret Trawls

Pilots Flood CAA With Information Requests Over Secret Trawls

The country’s commercial pilots are inundating the Civil Aviation Authority and Ministry of Justice with Official Information Requests to find out if their files have been looked at in secret.

Ahead of a High Court hearing next week into the legality of the CAA’s ‘random and secretive’ trawls through pilots’ records, more than 550 commercial pilots who are members of the New Zealand Air Line Pilots’ Association (NZALPA) are lodging Official Information Requests to find out if their files have already been secretly viewed.

The CAA is refusing to write to pilots telling them if they are part of what it calls the “the random sampling of conviction history information” where the Authority accesses, reviews and stores any information held on pilots by the Ministry of Justice.

NZALPA President, Mark Rammell says pilots are already required by law to disclose any relevant convictions and have told the CAA they support the move to ensure disclosures are correct, but the Association believes that the CAA’s method of conducting secret searches without ‘just cause’ isn’t legal.

The Pilots’ Association went to the High Court last month to stop a second planned trawl going ahead. The case will be heard in the Wellington High Court next Monday (20 June) and will focus on the Civil Aviation Act, Privacy act and Human Rights Act.

However, many of the NZALPA’s members had their records accessed earlier this year without being told, despite the Ministry of Justice advising the CAA that pilots being subject to a search should get a letter advising them of being part of a selected sample. That search found not one failure to disclose relevant information.

Mark Rammell says while next week’s High Court action aims to protect the rights of pilots in the future, the CAA has already gone though one hundred pilot files this year in its first secret trawl. “Many of our members have already had their files secretly accessed and the only way for them to find out is through an OIA request. If the CAA had been straight up in the first place, they could have avoided this costly mess.”

Mark Rammell said, “it’s only $300 dollars each year for the CAA to send a letter to a group of say 500 pilots. We’ll even pay for the stamps if it’s really an issue of cost getting in the way of a pilots’ right to know if their information is being accessed and stored by the CAA. If the CAA refuses, pilots will have no choice but to send hundreds of OIA requests every time the CAA trawls through their records.”

The Association said the CAA could also avoid next week’s Court action if it simply agreed to tell pilots if their information had been looked at. “For the sake of a letter we can resolve the issue and the CAA can get on with checking that pilots are being upfront in disclosing any convictions relevant to ensuring the safety of the travelling public.”

ENDS

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