Angel Flight offers an invaluable service to families in regional and remote areas burdened with an ill or disabled family member. Only two nights ago I spoke with Senator Hollie Hughes’ who had used Angel Flight for her own autistic son, Fred, to access city services from remote areas of NSW. She described it as a Godsend.
The findings in respect of community service flights are intensely bureaucratic in nature and clearly written by people sitting at a desk in Canberra without reference to any of the thousands of families that have been helped by organisations such as Angel Flight.
Indeed, it's hard to take the report’s analysis of Angel Flight seriously. It asserts that many flights can be replaced by commercial services almost blind to the costs of regional flights, their limited routes, and their limited schedules. Indeed, the data the ATSB uses to support its claim are based on the very narrowest of data sets.
The ATSB uses ‘lies, damned lies, and statistics’, coupled with predominantly subjective analysis, to portray community service flights as unsafe. Angel Flights use experienced pilots and safe aircraft. There is no difference in the safety case associated with a CASA certified pilot flying a mate to the footy in Melbourne and a CASA certified pilot flying someone to chemo therapy in Melbourne, except the ill patient is more aware of the qualifications of the pilots and the risks associated with a flight.
Its Pel-Air (Norfolk Island ditching) all over again - for that particular report the ATSB were found to be grossly incompetent and were ultimately required to redo the report.
If CASA and the ATSB were in charge of road transport, no one would be allowed to use the roads.
Hear! Hear! Senator Patrick.
Here is the crux of the problem: “invaluable service”. CASA does not put a value on community service flights and, even if it wanted to, it wouldn’t know how to balance that value against the cost of the risks. And once you resort to the rhetorical question: “what price a life?”, any mitigation at all is justifiable.