REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE IRISH AIRLINE PILOTS ASSOCIATION (IALPA) ANNUAL DINNER
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE IRISH AIRLINE PILOTS ASSOCIATION (IALPA) ANNUAL DINNER THURSDAY, 10TH MARCH 2011
Dia dhíbh a chairde, it's a pleasure to join you this evening. Thank you for your warm welcome and my thanks to Captain Evan Cullen, President of IALPA, for his very kind invitation to the annual dinner of your Association.
We want this to be a happy, convivial and collegial occasion and hopefully it will be but when it was being planned no-one could have forseen that it would take place exactly one month after that tragic plane crash at Cork airport. It seems only right that we should at the outset of this evening remember those who lost their lives, those who miraculously survived, those who are heartbroken and those who helped on a day that changed the narrative of Irish aviation so dramatically. It is also right that on this evening we remember the millions of people who fly safely and uneventfully into and out of Ireland year after year and the men and women who make it their vocation, their mission to ensure that flying remains what it is in fact, statistically the safest form of travel.
The members of IALPA are individually and collectively custodians of that safety. You are trained to the highest levels and tested to the highest levels. You work within a highly sophisticated system of national and international rules which govern your working life. They are all designed to keep you safe and to keep the flying public safe. The most recent ICAO audit of our safety oversight ranked Ireland amongst the best in the world, an outcome that did not happen as a result of some cosmic coincidence but thanks to the forensic intensity of the regulatory system here and the scrupulousness of the stakeholders in the industry, including professionals like yourselves, who ensure that safety consciousness is mainstreamed and uppermost in everything that you do. This Association is the voice of professional pilots in Ireland. It combines and distils the wisdom and experience of its members, skilfully analysing your insights into a knowledge base that informs best practice and drives the changes that keep the profession dymamic, ever improving and developing.
A remote bog in County Mayo was the unlikely place in which the first chapter in Irish and indeed global aviation was written when, in 1919, Alcock and Brown completed the first non-stop transatlantic flight and gave the Connaght Tribune the biggest scoop in its history. That legendary achievement was the inspiration for many subsequent pioneering aviation adventures from Colonel James Fitzmaurice’s co-piloting of the first east to west crossing of the Atlantic which took off from Baldonnel Aerodrome on 12 April 1928, to the eight year old Mayo schoolboy who dreamt of a proper runway in Mayo and who as Canon Horan delivered Knock airport to a population as incredulous as they were on the day Alcock and Brown crashlanded thirty miles from his home.
We can take pride too in the role played by Irish women in aviation history for it was a Limerick woman Lady Mary Heath who in 1926 became the first woman to hold a commercial flying licence in Britain. And tonight among the record number of retirees who are gracing this occasion are the first three female airline pilots to serve with Aer Lingus, Captains Grainne Cronin, Maria Hetherington and Susan Kavanagh, each of whom has a distinguished place in the still young annals of aviation in Ireland. To all the retirees, male and female, I say thank you for your years of unflinching professionalism, your dedication to the safe travelling of the public and your contribution to the respect in which Irish aviation and aviators are held world wide. May retirement bring each of you new types of fun and fulfilment and the time, health and energy to enjoy a new and exciting chapter in your own life.
The legacy of those who worked so hard to put Ireland centre stage in global aviation is evident today. This sector is not only an essential part of our national economic infrastructure but is key enabler of maintaining our connectedness with the rest of the world. International air access has become a central pillar of our economy, essential to our tourist industry, our trade, our commercial life and economic well-being. Your industry opens Ireland up to the world and the world to Ireland. Thanks to you we are not an isolated, peripheral island but a society which interrogates the world through extensive travel, is well known to the world through millions of visitors and which trades with the world through goods and products bought and sold in every corner of the world that has a landing strip.
Until the current recession hit, the aviation sector enjoyed dramatic growth over a 15-year period. However, as you know much better than the rest of us, this is a sector with special and peculiar vulnerabilities to external shocks from Sars, to volcanic eruptions, to regional conflict and to terrorist attack. These things and more have tested the resilience of the aviation sector and the persevering, resourceful spirit of Irish aviation has itself been inspirational to other sectors of the wider economy affected by the contemporary economic turbulence.
Not every emergency ends as brilliantly as that day on the Hudson river when the heroic cool-headed skill of Captain Chesley Sullenberger astounded the world. He turned out to be a man of few words but one of his answers to the many questions he was asked has stayed with me. Asked if he had prayed in those thirty seconds when he had to process the worst information in his career and make the most critical decision of his career he answered slowly - No - he was too busy doing his job but he hoped the people down the back were doing the praying.
Doing your job, doing it well, doing it right, no matter what - that is the essential imprint of the professional who carries the lives and health of others in his or her hands. We, the lay public have become so accustomed to air travel that we may have grown somewhat blasé and even presumptuous about the burden of responsibility that rests on your shoulders each time you fly us to our destination. On this night let me give you the thanks we all owe you.
For the way each of you and your professional association has honoured the vocation of aviation and the stewardship of public safety. I wish those of you not retired or retiring, continued years of connecting people and keeping them safe and comfortable in your care. To those retiring I wish you many years of proud reflection on a job well done. Enjoy this evening agus go raibh míle maith agaibh go léir.