An Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) report has revealed that miscommunication between a Malaysia Airlines A330 and ground crews, led to the March 31 incident in which the door of the aircraft was damaged.

According to Australia's online portal news.com.au, the A330 had collided with an aerobridge at Melbourne Airport when the captain released the park brake, without checking if the wheel chocks were in place.

It cited the ATSB report, which stated “the ground and flight crew procedures were not well harmonised, leading to reduced cohesion between the crews”.

“These problems reduced the likelihood that the respective procedures would be followed correctly,” said the report.

“In addition, the flight crew and engineers did not explicitly convey their actions and intentions to the others, resulting in a number of missed opportunities to discover the resulting procedural errors," it added.

Prior to the collision, it was reported that the captain had engaged the park brake while carrying out an external inspection of the plane before a scheduled flight to Kuala Lumpur.

This had led the aircraft maintenance engineer to assume that the park brake would remain on, and the main landing gear chocks were removed.

When the captain returned to the flight deck, however, he released the park brake out of sequence and the A330 rolled three metres into the aerobridge.

News.au further quoted Malaysia Airlines' response to the ATSB that it has plans to amend its procedures, so that flight crews would advise ground crews whenever the park brake was about to be released.

“As an interim measure, Malaysia Airlines sent A330 flight crews a reminder to communicate with ground crews before releasing the park brake to verify that chocks are in place,” the report said.

The national carrier is currently led by its chief executive officer Peter Bellew, following departure of Cristoph Mueller who had spearheaded its transformation programme.