I don't claim to be legal genius by any means, but how can an organisation, whose core business is to ensure the safety and compliance of the industry choose not to act when necessary, be anything but culpable in the event of an accident? (Ministers included in that)
Perhaps if this group (see link) get a bit of a following then pollies might start to listen:
But a lot of it comes down to (as Bill Hamilton said) the "Mystique of Aviation Safety" i.e. Fort Fumble just baffle the mob in charge with piles of steaming pony pooh.
Question: Wonder how many VOCAAs there are on PPRuNe? That's when they start to take notice...when they run out of toes and fingers to count, "sheesh Tony jump in your superman suit mate, this lot have got more than ten members"....after all it's all about the boats..sorry votes!
Hmmmm, this makes an intersting read. Especially the bit where they talk about the US implementing their increase in minimum standards next year (par 8).
Shortages only occur at a given price, these paragraphs from your linked article encapsulate the issue:
Quote:
"The cost of getting into flying is very expensive," Davis said. "When I talk to college students, if they're coming out of a four-year collegiate (aviation) program, most of them are $150,000 to $160,000 in debt. And that only gives them the qualifications to go be a flight instructor. If you're making $20,000 a year as a flight instructor you're lucky."
and this:
Quote:
If U.S. airlines start hiring pilots in large numbers, he said, pilots now flying for foreign carriers will likely return home. There are currently about 90,000 airline pilots in the U.S. and Canada.
There is also the PBS story on the life of a regional pilot: Flying Cheap.
If pay and conditions improved, this wouldn't even be an issue, high quality people would train as pilots. There is no shortage, there is only a shortage at the price the companies are prepared to pay. Any shortage is entirely of an the airlines own making.
Last edited by TheWholeEnchilada; 14th Jul 2012 at 01:44.
If pay and conditions improved, this wouldn't even be an issue, high quality people would train as pilots. There is no shortage, there is only a shortage at the price the companies are prepared to pay. Any shortage is entirely of an the airlines own making
I tend to agree with the above however airlines don't really pay any wages! Wages are paid by the passengers and freight owners and the airline has to guess at what the market will stand to cover all expenses and, let's face it, every person has a different perception of this.
Airlines just pass some of the money on as wages after raking off a good amount (some say too much) to cover those expensive executives, new aircraft and other expenses including shareholders dividend.
I see the trouble as airlines and unions not being honest with each other regarding profits and what airlines can afford to pay and what staff really want.
I couldn't help noticing the similarities between us and the pearling industry. Big money, lowering pay and conditions, inexperience, over stretched training resources, unmanged threats........the list goes on.
It was interesting to note in the thread http://www.pprune.org/dg-p-reporting...tstar-fwa.html that the person alleging unfair dismissal is one of the Jetstar cabin crew who gave evidence to the Inquiry on 04 Nov 11.
I wonder if this will make it to the Senate Privileges Committee?
That was my point in flagging it, but it will depend on the reasons for the termination and whether they are directly linked back to the fact that testimony was given and therein lies the problem.
It is early days and as long as some are watching the events unfold then this is the least that can be done as a show of support until the reasons are clear.
Some would also be mindful of the form shown by the star in the past in regard to their ability to adopt flexible and creative positions on the law and parliament.
He said: “The problem is that putting the ‘flight director’ on ‘off’ is recommended but… there is no reminder on the instruments panel.
If a "reminder" is needed to the pilots of such a simple process, then how about "reminders" for the myriad of other knobs, switches, levers on a modern flight deck. The problem here is that non-aviation savvy judges then think the lawyer is right and makes solemn judgements based on bulls#@t.
From the SMH Database Revealed: Politicians' gifts, trips and tickets
The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age have built a searchable database showing every Federal politician's financial interests. You can explore the information by category, by keyword, by politician or any combination of the three.
Quote:
Origin: Sydney; Dest: Europe; Upgrade: economy > business; Travel Date: 2011-07-10; Details: On 10 July and 31 July 2011 I accepted upgrades from Emirates travelling unofficially to and from Europe
Origin: Sydney; Dest: Singapore; Upgrade: economy > business; Sponsor: Qantas; Details: Upgrade given on flights to and from Singapore. Upgrade given by Qantas.
On 12 October 2011 I was given a box of chocolates from Board of Airlines Representatives association.
On 8 September I was presented with a cheese knife by the RAAA.
A small model A380 plane from Emirates.
06/06/2011 Presented with a tie at the IATA Conference in Singapore.
16/05/2011 Was presented with a set of coasters from the Transport Workers union.
12/02/2011 tie from president of IATA.
21/12/2010 iPad from Qantas (being used by my Sydney office).
24/11/10 model aircraft from Tiger Airlines.
Well - Mr. Albanese, GA certainly don't think much of you - not even a neck-tie!!
"It's not the Australian way to toss people $2, to toss them a gold coin, and then ask them to work for a day." Ms Gillard said.
In a video posted on the Sydney Mining Club's website on Wednesday, Ms Rinehart said Australians should not be complacent about mining investment when African workers were toiling for $2 a day.
"We support proper Australian wages and decent working conditions," Ms Gillard said.
"proper Australian wages and decent working conditions"
not in the Airline industry ...
Last edited by John Citizen; 5th Sep 2012 at 08:47.
There are plenty of other companies willing to dig up our mineral wealth and leave us a quarry
Well, the minerals belong to the States according to the constitution.
The States get Royalties from those who dig those minerals up.
Gillard reckons that wealth belongs to ALL Australians in spite of the constitution and is bunging on a tax over and above those Royalties to redistribute that wealth to the PBNWILV thus imposing extra burdens on people like Gina.
Except for the fact she owns Daddy's land under which those minerals lay, she may well spend her wealth in Africa. That would be good for all us Aussies no doubt??
Perhaps this is why so many projects are being "deferred" for the time being?
PBNWILV- poor bloody non working idiot Labor voters.
Just my take on the situation, but I'm probably wrong as usual.
GFR #404 - I couldn't help noticing the similarities between us and the pearling industry. Big money, lowering pay and conditions, inexperience, over stretched training resources, un managed threats........the list goes on.
All reflected in the Norfolk ditching. The list is indeed long and the Norfolk event is about to get swept under the flying carpet in the Ministers office. Enough already, enough.
The Air traffic control system is slowly disintegrating beyond the point of no return, you know this.
It's time Gentlemen; if the Norfolk Island accident, the Air France fatal or any of the recently published incidents don't convince you of that; then despite the rhetoric and white papers, the blood will be on your hands. Then, it will be truly a vote of conscience.
I strongly urge anyone contemplating a measured response to this topic to read the novel, Power without Glory, by Frank Hardy. This book was banned at one point by, (guess who), because it impinged sensitivities. It is as relevant today as it was when written.
Yeah good catch Frank and it brings to bear that..."the more things change the more they stay the same"...or as one wiseman said:
Quote:
GB Shaw: If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.
Since this in the Senate inquiry thread and "K" is basically making a plea for sanity to prevail in the chookhouse, it might be time to reflect on this article from Sandilands, as it is now relegated to the archives of obscurity..
"In a society where spin and media manipulation perpetuates myths about airline safety and keeps a lid on disclosures of unsafe practices the commitment of independent politician Nick Xenophon to his proposed Senate Inquiry into pilot training standards might trigger some long overdue reforms.
As Senator Xenophon pointed out in his address to the Australian and International Pilots Association recently, Australia is tolerating what the US now finds intolerable, which is the placing of pilots with as little as 200 hours experience in the right hand or first officer seat of airliners.
It is a madness that needs to be hauled up sharp in this country. It requires a revaluation of piloting skills and safety cultures. There are a number of elements to this controversy. One of them is the corruption of airline safety ‘cultures’ into ones where pilots increasingly think like accountants or shareholders rather than professional pilots required to conform to some very serious rules about what defines safe flight, including loss of control and upset situations, fuel and weather considerations and separation in uncontrolled air space.
Another is the popular insistence by airlines, here and elsewhere, on the notion that meeting the requirements of airworthiness directives, or maintenance intervals, or tick-the-boxes flying courses for flying skills delivered by outside trainers, all represent world’s best practice.
This is a popular lie. All the carriers are doing is meeting the minimum legal standards, or even delegating the achievement of those standards to external enterprises they have no control over. The standards required in these cases are not the highest available, they are the cheapest legally available standards, and in the case of regulatory matters like airworthiness directives, they are often the end result of ‘consultations’ between the carriers, the regulators and equipment manufacturers which involve the commercial consequences for airlines.
Airbus has been vocal on the topic diminishing flying skills, yet has been firmly challenged by the French accident investigators over its history in handling piloting issues where unreliable airspeed warnings are generated by ice clogging external air speed probes. Boeing infamously dragged the chain over 737 rudder control failures that confronted pilots with a bewildering and potentially disastrous problem for years, indeed, it even slandered the pilots who died in struggling to save several stricken jets before the truth about a lethal design error finally came out.
But back to a tighter focus. Xenophon has gone for pilot training standards in this country, which are in crisis, and for inadequate incident reporting procedures.
There is more than enough in both to keep a Senate Inquiry very usefully occupied.
Xenophon has called for Alan Joyce, as then CEO of Jetstar, to explain himself over the July 2007 botched missed approach to Melbourne of an A320. Was Joyce ignorant of his obligations to the law, or did he chose to ignore them? In this incident the airline he was responsible for broke the law on the reporting of safety incidents, and only disclosed the true situation when the ATSB felt compelled to act on a media report by myself, one and half months later. After which the ATSB produced a damning report, yet failed to refer Jetstar to the Commonwealth public prosecutor.
The ATSB is a world class technical investigator that is too timid to refer breaches of the law on failures to report serious operational incidents involving major carriers. Most recently, it sat on its hands while Tiger Airways chose to ignore its legal obligations concerning an aileron failure in one of its A320s because Tiger had decided the Australian laws didn’t matter.
It has a habit of making excuses for the airlines, although not in the case of the Lockhart River disaster in 2005, in which it nailed CASA for lack of appropriate action against a carrier it knew was dangerous.
Which raises an important issue for the Senate to consider. When the safety regulator CASA finds evidence that an operator is unsafe, does it not have an obligation to tell the travelling public, rather than do nothing to warn them, allowing an unsafe operation to continue flying in that particular case until it killed 15 people?
In the Crikey story linked above and published yesterday, reference is made to a Qantaslink incident at Sydney Airport on Boxing Day 2008, which was also covered by Plane Talking in June.
The ATSB report is woefully evasive in its accounting for this astonishing incident. A Qantaslink turbo-prop, with 50 seats, nearly stalls twice in 10 seconds on approach to Sydney airport, during which a first officer with limited experience on the type disobeys an instruction by the captain to go around rather than try and complete an ‘unstable’ approach to the runway.
The report fails to explain how standards at Qantaslink could be so pathetic as to allow this situation to arise. It fails to detail what then happened in the Qantaslink management of its safety standards. It doesn’t tell us what submissions Qantaslink made, or what submissions the CASA safety regulator made. The final report is only released after the wording has been read and passed by the airline and the safety investigator, although it can ignore objections by the parties being investigated.
The public just doesn’t get any inkling as to what really happened. In the US the NTSB, the ATSB equivalent, would have held public hearings into the Qantaslink incident, and the airline management would have been cross examined as to how such an unacceptable situation had occurred.
The public would not have been subjected to spin about our wonderful safety standards. There is nothing wonderful about a Qantas turbo-prop being put in peril twice in 10 seconds by the flight standards that it is the obligation of the company to uphold and administer.
This proposed inquiry is of critical importance to all air travellers in Australia."
So did the Senate Inquiry make one iota of difference??
Supplementary budget estimates will be held from 15 to 18 October 2012.
The link below takes you to a –'download'-- button' which, if clicked will provide a summary of the petition and survey conducted through PPRuNe last year.
Potential Breach of Privilege
