Dick,
I think I agree with VOR – but I’m no risk expert. I do think there’s a whole lot of safety areas out there that need to be looked at besides airspace. Didn’t the ATSB recently say that the average age of the GA fleet in Oz is about 25 or 30 years. If that’s an average, that means there probably some 40 or more year old GA aircraft carrying paying passengers out there – scary, no matter how good the maintenance.
Then you have this spate of accidents happening recently involving light aircraft – maybe I’m missing something – but does anyone see an increasing trend in accidents over the last year or so? It may not have anything to do with the age of the aircraft – but then again, if you look underneath it all, maybe the fact that our GA industry is in such decline, and as an industry we can’t afford to get newer aircraft, and the cost of hiring these older airplanes is so expensive, maybe we’re forcing people to fly in less regulated environments, like ultralights and so on.
And if you look at some of the recent threads, you have airlines screaming for pilots, and offering to take them on with a lot fewer hours that the old days. There’s got to be something worth looking into there.
Even Dick’s thread about changes to streamline the system is throwing up heaps of ideas, some good, some bad, that should be looked into, and which would deliver a whole lot of benefits at a lot less stress that the airspace change stuff we’ve been agonising over for nearly 20 years.
And of course my old hobby horse – who’s looking over the shoulder of the service providers. There’s heaps of safety incidents amongst controllers – and they keep saying on this forum that they’re overworked and stressed and that Airservices and Defence keep pushing for more.
Somehow I think we need to take a look at the whole picture, like VOR says. Work out where to spend the safety or productivity dollar best. After all, unlike the ‘States, we’re paying for most of the services we get – not the taxpayer.