Folks,
I am going to put my final two bobs worth in, on this subject, by coming back the the basic principles of ICAO airspace design, and that is achieving the design separation assurance standard at the lowest airspace classification, starting with G.
Again, by definition of the design principles, once the separation assurance standard is achieved, higher classes of airspace will not achieve a real reduction in risk, because the separation assurance standard is already so high. Whether you agree or not is immaterial, that is no more than your personal opinion.
Indeed, several orders of magnitude higher ( lesser risk) than losing a complete aircraft on an auto-couples Cat II/III approach, or the probability of an aircraft CFIT (without regard to GPWS) during an approach (or departure) designed to current PANS/OPS standards ---- all the above have had a core element of risk management built in for many, many years.
Clearly, I am quite happy to accept the ICAO approach to risk management.
That the basics of ICAO airspace design is not accepted by a range of pilots and ATC individuals in Australia says more about Australian aviation attitudes to modern risk management, than it says about the veracity of the basic ICAO risk management standards.
Strangely, pilots don't complain about the hazard levels in instrument procedure design, but the inherent hazards and the mitigators employed to reduce the final risk, still leave a level of risk that is not ALARP, as most of you interpret ALARP. Indeed, there is no such thing as a SID or IAP that would not be "safer" with a higher minima, but that is not the way such design works. In fact, if you employed the same logic applied here to C over D versus E over D, there would be no low weather minima approaches, and probably no 200' CAT 1 ILS. We would revert to a minimum of 300 or 400', as was the case in Australia back in the '60's and early '70s, long after the rest of the world has adopted CAT 1/200' as the basic ILS minima.
As one example, we continue to kill pilots with monotonous regularity, during asymmetric training, because we have not adopted a proper risk management approach, either at a regulatory or field level.
Whether you like it or not, CASA is bound to use a risk management approach across the board, witness the work being done by Aerosafe as a consultant to CASA, putting the meat on the bones of the basic policy of risk management.
I have not the least concern about "being seen", indeed all my own aircraft have had ARINC standard transponders, either King or Collins, all of that nonsense about "stealth" operations is a red herring, as far as I am concerned.
We simply must adopt the best risk management standards in aviation, will we ever?? I don't know, but I have been pushing such adoption since well (years) before AS/NZ 4360 Issue 1 was even published.
For those of you who want to have a bit of fun with the statistical term, "vanishingly small", it may be the equivalent of zero in maths, but "vanishingly small" is never "nil", or in other words, risk can never be nil, short of abolishing the activity. If you decline to understand/accept that, it is no skin of my nose, but it does make the probability of your arguments being accepted ( in a technical, not political sense) , dare I say it, vanishingly small.
That you might succeed at a political level, by scaring the beejesus out of politicians, does not invalidate ICAO airspace design principles, it just proves how hard modernization of anything to do with aviation is in Australia.
As to mandatory ADS-B/C, that has been done to death, but essentially nothing has changed, since the "recommendations" of a group that had neither fiscal or real world responsibility for their recommendations, were dropped like a hot brick by Government.
Tootle pip!!
Last edited by LeadSled; 17th Apr 2010 at 06:11.