An airline giant has been fined £3.2 million following two ‘near-identical’ incidents involving injured baggage handlers using televators.
The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) brought the prosecution following the accidents at Heathrow Airport in 2022 and 2023. Both incidents resulted in injuries and raised concerns over the airline’s long-standing failure to implement adequate safety measures for employees working at height.
The first incident occurred on 25 August 2022 while a 54-year-old baggage handler was unloading baggage containers from an aircraft. He slipped off a televator – a belt-loader platform used to transfer luggage onto aircraft – and landed 1.5 metres onto the ground below.
The company pleaded guilty to a breach of regulation 6(3) of the Work at Height Regulations, which requires employers to take suitable and sufficient measures to prevent falls.
Less than seven months later, on 8 March 2023, a second employee was injured in a similar fall from a televator. The 43-year-old landed three metres onto the ground below, and sustained head injuries, including a fractured jaw and bleeding on the brain.
The HSE found there were gaps between the televator’s guardrails and the aircraft fuselage, the size of which depended on the type of aircraft, creating the fall from height hazard. The gaps increased in size after the front of the televators’ platforms at Terminal 5 were extended – but additional measures to prevent falls from height had not been implemented.
At the time of the first incident, they had started a programme to retrofit extendable guardrails to televators in response to previous HSE visits. This was completed following the incident.
The company was fined £1.33 million in relation to the August 2022 incident, and £1.875 million in relation to the March 2023 incident. The company was also ordered to pay £20,935 in costs at Southwark Crown Court.
In 2021, the airline was fined £1.8 million for ‘significant failings’ in the general management of supervision and monitoring, risk assessment and training.
The company said ‘since these incidents, we have undertaken a thorough review of our procedures and have implemented enhanced safety measures and training to prevent such events from happening again’.
What can we learn from this case?
‘The aviation sector involves very special risks due to the need to move a large number of heavy and hard to lift items, namely luggage, in confined spaces, often at height and under significant time pressure to avoid costly delays,’ noted John Kushnick, legal operations director at National Accident Helpline. ‘The incidents were shocking not only for their severity but also because they were entirely avoidable through simple, inexpensive safety measures. ‘Employers in the aviation and transport sectors have clear legal responsibilities to protect the safety of their workers,’ ,’ he told IOSH magazine. ‘Among the most fundamental of these is the requirement to provide guard rails on any equipment used for working at height. These are not expensive, but even if they were, employers would still be legally obligated to provide them.
Source – IOSH
