Inceased Safety................ Where?
Dick........... How can you base your studies on the safety level of the american system when there are so many factors that differ between both systems. For starters, if you are going to reduce costs in air traffic control, how about passing some of them onto the consumer in the way of upgraded radar. It might be well and fine for yourself as you buzz up and down the east coast of australia which has 90% radar coverage but, how bout the rest of australia once you get west of say, the great dividing range. I believe that one of the successes of the american system is that although much of it is see and avoid.... their air traffic controllers have 100% situational awareness of who is where.
Have you stopped to think about the rest of australia outside the radar zones where if you had the minimum visibility, even in something as small as a C206, going head on with another of the same type, you only have 40 seconds until a collision. Now the human brain takes 20 seconds to compute whether their is a confliction, that is on average, so allow another 10 seconds for a fudge factor, and you have reduced our lifespan to 10 seconds..... just enough time for us to say " holy shhhhhh.........". The mere fact of this timing also relies on you picking up something the size of a fly at 5km, both seeing each other at the same time and both taking corrective action as per the regulations and your training......
I also found it funny to get home last week and see Mr Anderson in his speech on the New Airspace to cabinet...." Mr Speaker, i must stress again.... everyone wanted this new airspace, QANTAS wanted it, Virgin wanted it....... all Australian Operators wanted it". He then went on to say " and i must stress Mr Speaker, there have been NO near misses, nor is there likely to be". If this is not the best example of polititians at their best(lying), I don't know what is. Need i remind you dick of 2 Metros head to head 36 secs from collision in the NT in the first few days,both of whom were perfectly correct within your new airspace (the only person who had any idea was the air traffic controller who was nearly having a heart attack), secondly Virgin and a light aircraft, both of whom were also perfectly legal in your new system. If i remember correctly, your industry consultation was to the effect of " here it is boys, we are getting it, stiff ****, any questions?". You might as well just not have even bothered to have told us anything and just changed it off your own back.
I also must point out to you that most of a pilots situation awareness comes from position reports over the radios. While i do agree that there is often a lot of useless chatter, I disagree that removing the boundaries and frequencies will improve safety. How can it when your "educational material" specifies [b] MONITOR AN APPROPRIATE FREQUENCY[b]...... how the bloody hell can we do this when you remove the appropriate frequency!!!!!!!! Pull your head out of your ass dick and stop being a DICK!!!!! Fair enough we need changes, just not yours!!!!!!