None of the three stooges are properly 'aviation' qualified
It is interesting to note that this fact didn't go unnoticed by the Senators:
Hansard page 59:Senator FAWCETT: Do any of the commissioners have a background or qualification in aviation accident investigation?
Mr Dolan: I do not believe any of the three commissioners are qualified in aviation accident investigation. I have a reasonably significant background in aviation safety—air security and various other things—and a broader background in safety, including work health and safety and the systems approach to that. The other two commissioners have backgrounds in marine safety and rail safety.
If we look at Mr Dolan’s “significant background in aviation safety” we will find that his experience is totally devoid of any aviation operational experience.
Reference ATSB website:
Mr Dolan has worked as a Commonwealth public servant for 30 years. Prior to the ATSB, he was Chief Executive Officer of Comcare, with responsibility for the occupational health and safety and workers' compensation of Commonwealth employees.
From 2001-2005 he was Executive Director, Aviation and Airports at the Department of Transport and Regional Services, with responsibility for airport sales and regulation, aviation security, aviation safety policy and international aviation negotiations.
Previously, Mr Dolan had undertaken various corporate management roles in the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, including Chief Finance Officer and Head of Corporate Management. He started his public service career in 1980 with AusAid, managing aid projects in developing countries.
Basically the Chief Commissioner is a career-crat who has no aviation operational experience. The other two Commissioner’s have no aviation experience but they do have experience in the other two areas of the ATSB’s remit.
This would appear directly in conflict with the annual report statistics (2010-2011) for the separate areas of the ATSB remit, where we find that a whopping 85% of all the investigations instigated by the ATSB are aviation related.
With Beaker's propensity for tidiness and staying within budget and Big Mack's propensity for bully boy tactics and covering up the failings of Fort Fumble is it any wonder that we ended up with a totally doctored report devoid of any meaningful safety recommendations and missing the valuable lessons normally contained within the 'Survivability Aspects' that "K" alludes to...
Newsflash: Ben has picked up on the tabling of the ATSB Annual Report and makes some astute observations from that report:
ATSB annual report has systemic trouble with the truth
Ben Sandilands | Oct 31, 2012 1:31PM | EMAIL | PRINT
The ATSB annual report has been tabled in Federal Parliament, and is laced with incorrect claims that the authors, and perhaps the Government, might have hoped would pass unnoticed.
At year’s end we had 56 larger aviation investigations on hand which represents a stable workload. This year only four of those investigations are over one year old, which demonstrates that we have reached a sustainable level of activity that allows us to meet our targets for timely investigation while maintaining the high quality of our work.
In fact one of those reports, into the Pel-Air ditching at Norfolk island on 18 November 2009, was already nearly three years old, had been deemed to have been nearly complete in February 2012 on the ATSB web site, and is now following its publication on 30 August, the subject of a Senate inquiry, serious allegations of impropriety and abuse of process, and certain embarrassing admissions by its chief commissioner Martin Dolan and its general manager aviation investigations, Ian Sangston.
The ATSB has been disgraced by the Pel-Air report, which could be read as being willfully evasive, incomplete, vindictive and contemptuous of any public safety obligation, and should be withdrawn and done again so that it actually deals with the safety issues and human and systemic factors that it chose to ignore.
In relation to the unsafe state of air traffic control in Australia, the ATSB report says:
We are continuing our work to understand and mitigate the number of breakdowns of separation (BOS) and losses of separation assurance (LOSA) in air traffic control. Although the rate of these occurrences this year was broadly reflective of earlier years, we continue to examine individual occurrences in order to prevent their recurrence, but have also initiated a safety research investigation to bring the results of completed investigations together and compare their results with each other and the overall occurrence data set. To date, no significant, systemic safety issues have been identified as a result of our ongoing assessment of BOS/LOSA occurrences.
In fact, the ATSB produced in the year to June a series of reports into air traffic control failings which identify incomplete recurrent training issues in occurrences that have included controllers forgetting what they were doing and vectoring airliners into converging paths, in some cases annotated by the second and complete with diagrams that bring the performance of ASirServices Australia into disrepute.
The ATSB appears to operate to a unique meaning of the word ‘systemic’ given the fact that is has identified recurrent and entrenched issues in AirServices Australia and some air operators which it has chosen not to label as ‘systemic’.
We have safety problems in this country, and we have a problem with their full and frank disclosure.