Jonkster
As I understand it, Dick’s overarching point is that the aviation safety system, including the airspace system, should be designed and run on the basis of objective risk assessments and cost-effective risk mitigation. It’s hard to argue with that point, in principle.
Unfortunately, the aviation safety system in Australia is designed and run as much on the basis of politics, industrial relations (to the small extent that industrial relations isn’t politics), intuition (usually the gross over-estimation of the probabilities of things like mid-air collisions) and the leverage that provides to the bureaucracy (summarised as ‘the mystique of aviation’) as it is on objective risk and cost.
This ‘discussion’ is just déjà vu all over again, again, once again.
There is, in fact, a cultural difference between Australia and countries like the USA, especially in relation to how aviation and individual aviators fit into the ‘fabric’ of society. This thread on Beechtalk is a very real and instructive manifestation of the difference:
https://www.beechtalk.com/forums/vie...p?f=7&t=147342. I’ll guarantee that there will be Australian aviators and ATCers who would read the content of that thread and conclude that private pilots choosing to fly VFR in the USA are selfish and the airspace and radio arrangements are ‘dangerous’. However, there are some very good reasons why the USA is the greatest aviation nation in the world. One of those reasons is that private aviation is part of the fabric of the culture and an individual pilot’s rights are considered paramount. In Australia, individuals are the playthings of regulators.
Many pilots in Australia don’t spend much time in uncontrolled airspace in proximity to lots of other aircraft. The thought of an unknown, uncontrolled aircraft ‘nearby’ is very scary.
The natural response to the perception of the consequences of an airborne collision is the over-estimation of its probabilities, with the outcome being calls for the imposition of more requirements and restrictions, such as enlarging the areas in which CTAF procedures must be used/MBZs/AFIZs/compulsory radio.
As Dick points out, an objective assessment of collision risk at places like Port Bloggsland or Mildura either justifies e.g. Class D airspace as a cost-effective mitigation of the risk, or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, then the internationally-agreed airspace classification would be either E, F or G, depending on the risk.
Evidently the airspace regulator does not consider the risk sufficient to justify e.g. Class D at places like Port Bloggsland or Mildura. Whether that outcome is the result of an objective assessment of risk and the cost benefit of Class D - who knows. This is where the political game of pass the stinking parcel gets played. And it always seems that it’s the private/recreational pilots - the ‘lowest common denominators’ - who eventually get the stinking parcel dumped in their laps.
Class D would cost money. Do the airlines want to pay for it? No way. Stinking parcel passed into the lap of the boys and girls at the front of the RPT aircraft that operate in and out of these places. Those boys and girls think - sh*t! - there are all these unknown aircraft out there that are collision risks when I’m inbound to and outbound from uncontrolled aerodromes. And they are the ‘lowest common denominator’. (I always consider that sleight to be as much a reflection on the person’s unconscious evaluation of their own skills and lack of experience as anything else. Some skygods seem to be unaware of how many heavy metal and fast-jet drivers fly light powered or unpowered aircraft in their leisure time.)
The solution? We want to know who’s there, and we want as big an area as possible in which everyone has to broadcast their location and intentions so we can make operational decisions in a timely way. And thus the 20nm CTAF area/MBZ/AFIZ ideas are hatched/reincarnated. (The irony is that there were always exceptions to that rule, and no-radio aircraft have operated in lots of these places. Out of sight/ears, out of mind and no risk!)
Let’s pass the stinking parcel into the laps of the ‘lowest common denominators’. Fit radio and use it or you are banned from this chunk of sky! The operators of Mildura thought they could do this by simply putting a sentence in ERSA. Bloggsie even runs his own air traffic control system at Port Bloggsland, from his seat 0A.
Forget the objective risk: We’ll run this or press for it to be run on the basis of our perceptions.
Nobody wants aircraft to have mid-air collisions. More power to the arms of the people who dedicate their lives on the ground to keeping aircraft separated in flight. But they have small screens with big blips, and a couple of nautical miles looks quite close. And pilots dedicate their lives to not killing their passengers, so the avoidance of mid-air collisions is kinda ‘core business’. But they naturally over-estimate the probabilities of those collisions.
The outcome is that all this time and energy and controversy and change and cost is dedicated to a risk that is orders of magnitude smaller than the risks that are killing people and could be mitigated at less cost. The proximity of another aircraft probably didn’t kill the people in the seaplane tragedy on the river at Cowan in Sydney. It probably didn’t kill the people in the Kingair tragedy at Essendon. It probably didn’t kill the Angel Flight patient in the tragedy at Mount Gambier. It probably didn’t kill the people in the Mallard tragedy on the Swan River. It probably didn’t kill the people on board the C210s near Albany and Darwin. It probably didn’t kill the people in the Metro tragedy at Lockhart River. It probably didn’t kill most of the people who’ve died in aviation accidents in Australia.
Someone will usually pipe up and say: All it will take is one collision with an RPT aircraft at a place like Mildura and there will be and immediate ‘upgrade’ in the airspace or restrictions on the aircraft that may operate near the aerodrome. And that prediction is probably accurate.
But that’s what’s wrong with perception-driven regulation. There is, in fact,
no airspace classification that results in zero risk of collisions.
None. If you design and build an airspace system on the basis of an objective risk assessment and cost-effective mitigation, you build a system with the understanding that there is a calculated level of risk that a collision will occur, but the cost of mitigating that risk is greater than the cost of the collision. If the counter-argument is that ‘you can’t put a price on a life’, it inexorably follows that all airspace should be Class A - if manned aviation is to occur at all. (And nobody should be allowed to drive on the roads.)
I agree with your implicit point that it’s difficult-if-not impossible to pin Dick down on the all-important devilish-detail of the system he is advocating. He’s his own worst enemy some times.
For my part, I just want a stable system that isn’t constantly fiddled with on the basis of perceived - invariably grossly overestimated - risk.