Plane crashes in Hong Kong should be investigated by an independent air safety board rather than the existing government panel, a visiting aviation expert said yesterday. US accident investigator Paul McCarthy called the probe into last year's China Airlines crash at Chek Lap Kok 'cursory' and said the lack of an impartial safety board was an 'absolute Achilles' heel'. Mr McCarthy, executive air safety chairman of the International Air Line Pilots' Association, said Hong Kong had a top-class airport and respected home carriers, but lagged behind the West and several other Asian countries by having a government department in charge of investigations. 'The Civil Aviation Department might be at fault [in a crash situation], and we're asking them to investigate themselves. That's rubbish,' he said. Mr McCarthy said authorities had a role in investigations but pilots, engineers, air traffic controllers and airlines also needed a voice. He suggested that Asian countries together form one or two regional investigating bodies. 'If every one of them has their own accident investigation authority, nobody will ever get enough practice to get good at it,' he said. Mr McCarthy attacked the department's handling of the China Airlines crash on August 22 last year in which three people died when a jet overturned while landing at Chek Lap Kok in a typhoon. 'We're very disappointed with Hong Kong. From an outsider looking in, the investigation was fairly cursory . . . and has not, to the best of my knowledge, resulted in any concrete recommendations. It's just sort of gone away,' he said. 'This tends to be a Southeast Asian thing . . . There's an established pattern in this region that we do not get topical, timely, accurate information following an accident. 'Is it a 'face' thing? I don't know, but they don't want to give a half-answer. They won't say, 'This is what we've found so far, this is where we think we're going'. But you cannot do this in secret. You cannot wait until it's all done. If you do that, what you're going to end up with is a situation where by the time you get the information, the fixes you propose are no longer relevant.' Mr McCarthy said this not only reflected badly on the airline, plane and airport involved but had safety implications for the rest of the world. 'If you do something in Asia or don't do something in Asia, you withhold information that the rest of the world could use to make things safer, and that's unacceptable,' he said. '[Authorities] have to understand that the public release of at least a portion of the information in a timely fashion is the only way that everybody is going to have confidence in what they're doing.' Mr McCarthy, a lawyer and Delta Airlines pilot with 28 years' flying experience, was speaking on the fringes of an Asia-Pacific seminar on flight safety. He has worked on several accident investigations in the US. A Civil Aviation Department spokeswoman last night said existing procedures worked well and hit back at criticism of the China Airlines inquiry. 'Within one month of the accident we published our initial report outlining the accident,' she said. 'We will publish the complete findings when the investigation is completed - there's no intention of the department to cover up anything.' She said the department had sought outside advice from experts at the US National Transportation Safety Board, manufacturer Boeing and civil aviation authorities in Taiwan. 'We try to ensure impartiality by calling on other experts in aircraft accidents to participate.'