PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Accident Near Mangalore Airport - Possibly 2 Aircraft down
Old 2nd Mar 2020, 08:12
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Lead Balloon
 
Join Date: Nov 2001
Location: Australia/India
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Originally Posted by AlphaVictorFoxtrot
I mean, considering the current system is clearly not working (from my lurking the forums, it seems like it's a recurring topic), doesn't seem like it would be any worse trying it the Canadian way, eh?
Almost everything has been tried a few times. Except....

Class E to 1,200’.

There’s a reason for airspace designation having originally been done in Airservices and why moving it to CASA was not and is not a panacea.

Let’s take the option of reinstating the AFIZ system. CASA could do that with a stroke of a pen. Same with making various chunks of airspace around aerodromes E or D. But....

CASA’s stroke of a pen cannot create and fund the resources to deliver the required AFIS. Service provision - the ‘S’ in ‘AFIS’ - is up to an ANSP. Ditto ATC in E or D.

Accordingly, unless an ANSP is willing and able to and does provide the services necessary for the chunk of airspace designated by the regulator, the designation is practically meaningless. Either the designated airspace cannot be used because the required service is not provided, or the airspace reverts to good ‘ol G (or, more accurately, what Australia calls G).

So you can see the ostensibly compelling argument: Let Airservices designate airspace because, as a matter practicality, Airservices gets to decide whether or not the airspace gets ‘serviced’.

The purists - as you can see in this thread - say the regulator should designate airspace based upon objective risk and international standards. Quite so. Who’d argue with that? However, it follows either that: (1) the kind of risks to which passengers are exposed on RPT flights in and out of places like Mildura don’t justify anything other than Australian G, or (2) the regulator is too timid, for political reasons, to ‘upgrade’ the surrounding airspace.

Last edited by Lead Balloon; 2nd Mar 2020 at 08:58.
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