CASAweary
CASA only ever played at SMS and I'm not convinced they really have embraced the future of safety regulation
The safety risks of pilot P-platers and new style airline managers raised in Senate – Plane Talking
Australia’s largest pilot union has warned that the indifference of airline managements and young pilots to training standards and experience is dragging down safety from its previously high level in this country.
It has sent a Statement of Concern on Diminishing Flight Standards to senators in advance of the impending Senate Inquiry into these matters.
Headed Are we handing the keys of the Ferrari to a bunch of P-platers the paper by the Australian and International Pilots Association says the operational safety of the country’s major airlines is falling.
The president of the association, Captain Barry Jackson, said this morning that there was a ‘total disconnection between new managements at airlines and the high safety cultures of the past that Australians are lead to believe in today.’
The AIPA paper says pilot conditions and training arrangements are being made “the playthings of young MBAs trying to make their mark in the business world.”
The Senate inquiry, instigated by the South Australian independent senator Nick Xenophon, will consider tough new standards for pilot training and experience levels in Australia following the US reaction to the Colgan crash at Buffalo in February 2009, which killed 50 people after two badly trained and fatigued pilots lost control of a Q400 turboprop.
The US Federal Aviation Administration subsequently lifted the minimum experience level for a first officer flying for a major American carrier to 1500 hours, compared to as little as 250 hours in Australia.
In the paper, AIPA says :
“We must make a stand to protect the safety of the public and ourselves…There is growing evidence that we have stagnated at safety levels achieved in 2003 and may even be going slowly backwards.
“Very low air fares have increased the demographic pool of potential air travellers and created a significant demand for increased capacity that appears set to continue.
“However the expectation of the public is generally that the cheap fares come without any reduction in safety.”
AIPA says the current emphasis on streamlined and lower flight time progression to a pilot job with a major airline is fraught with compromises, exacerbated by shifting the costs to the would be pilots through courses run by third party training solutions providers who are compromised by the need to churn out ‘qualified’ pilots to the carriers who award them contracts.
The statement makes no secret of AIPA’s industrial agenda in terms of protecting Australian pilot jobs in Australia but also expresses what many have recently spoken about in recent times as serious failures in the cultural attitudes of new pilot recruits and the low cost carrier management styles of all the major Australian carriers, which despises and exploits those trying to fast track their careers in them.