THE nation's peak aviation safety agency is under fire after revelations that the engine of the aircraft involved in Monday's skydiving accident, which killed five people, had a history of "abnormal" failures.]

Doubts were raised yesterday over whether the Civil Aviation Safety Authority could have done more to prevent the crash as investigators began taking apart the engine of the Cessna 206, salvaged from a dam at Willowbank, west of Brisbane. after reports of black smoke coming from the aircraft during take-off.

It emerged that one of the two crash survivors, Brian Scoffell, co-owner of the Brisbane Skydiving Centre that operated the aircraft, faced diciplinary action after a Brisbane teenager died during a jump in March 2000.

The aircraft was the subject of an Australian Transport Safety Bureau report in November 2004 for failure to comply with an altitude directive, but investigators did not take any action against the company or the pilot.

ATSB officials expect to have an indication within days of the cause of the crash, which killed four skydivers and the pilot when the Cessna plunged into the dam soon after takeoff.

The engine was similar to one that failed in a Whyalla Airlines light plane that crashed in Spencer Gulf in South Australia in May 2000, killing eight people.

A former Whyalla Airlines operator, Chris Brougham, said he was appalled to hear the Cessna had an engine like the one that failed in the company's Piper Navajo Chieftain. He questioned whether CASA had done enough to prevent Monday's tragedy.

"If it's a Lycoming engine and it's subsequently shown to be a similar problem to the one that caused the Whyalla tragedy, it's absolutely amazing CASA hasn't done something to detect this problem before now and done something to fix it," Mr Brougham told ABC radio.

ATSB spokesman Alan Stray said it was too early to say if the replacement of the Cessna's original engine with the more powerful Lycoming TIO-540 turbocharged engine contributed to the crash. "This engine type had a run of crankshaft failures that was quite abnormal a couple of years ago, but other than that the failure modes we have registered in our database are just standard you would expect from any other engine," he said.

 Monday's crash will renew scrutiny of the skydiving industry, which under civil aviation laws is subject to fewer aircraft maintenance and safety audits than other aviation operators.

Angela Garvey, joint owner of the Brisbane Skydiving Centre, declined to comment, saying she was distraught. She said Mr Scoffell, 57, who suffered burns and a broken elbow in the crash, was in hospital but "doing fine".

The other survivor, Amanda Best, 27, is in hospital in a serious but stable condition. She was found dazed beside the dam, and is believed to have spinal injuries.

 Among the five people killed in the crash was Nigel O'Gorman, 34, an Irishman who had worked as a parachuting instructor with the centre for five years and had performed thousands of jumps.

Pilot Anthony Winter, 22, from Rochedale, west of Brisbane, and another parachuting instructor, a 41-year-old Englishman, were killed. The crash also claimed the lives of a 49-year-old Englishwoman and a 40-year-old woman from Nerang on the Gold Coast, believed to have been given the skydive as a birthday present.