Interesting post “K”
and highlights yet another unexplained and unresolved, tainted area within the remit of the Pel-Air enquiry that hopefully hasn’t got past the attention of the good Senators.
A quick Sunday afternoon google search for unrecovered blackboxes turns up a list total of twelve (I guess soon to be 13) from 1965. Some of those cases it wasn’t from a lack of trying to retrieve them. And sometimes they were totally or partially destroyed or lost.
The irony of the Pel-Air Norfolk ditching is that if the crew and pax had of perished then the bureau and FF would have been obligated to recover the blackbox!
Besides being a rather embarrassing retraction by the DAS and points to the question whether the DAS is indeed the puppetmaster or the puppet, the following is interesting in the context of the unrecovered blackbox:
At page 41 of the Hansard from Monday 22 October it was stated:
CHAIR: So your department had no part, no conversations, in the recovery of the black box?
Mr McCormick: No, Senator, we did not.
CHAIR: No input at all?
Mr McCormick: No, Senator.
I have since been advised that this statement is not correct. On 8 December 2009
the ATSB raised with CASA by email the possibility of contributing to a joint fund
sharing arrangement to recover the black box and was advised that CASA did not have the funds to contribute to that exercise. I was not aware of this email at the time of my advice to the Committee.
I apologise if my comments have been in any way misleading.
Besides the fact that the Hansard reference to which he refers is actually located on page 53 this revelation may call into question some of the issues that Kharon raises in post #961.
§ How can it be that FF doesn’t have the necessary funds and where’s the cost/benefit/analysis?
§ As “K” infers could it be that FF legal considered the CVR information could be detrimental to their case of trying (initially) to prosecute the pilot under S20A of the Act and given the protections section 32 AO-AU afford the flight crew?
§ Could it also be that FF were aware that had the blackbox been retrieved then the bureau would have full and privileged control over the CVR/FDR information as per the TSI Act?
The DAS revelation would have been a contributing factor to bean-counter Beaker’s ultimate decision not to recover the black box, which
he explained to the committee on page 67 of the Hansard
:
Mr Dolan: At the initial stages, we understood the aircraft was in comparatively shallow water and that access to the recorders would be reasonably achievable by a diver or other mechanisms without too much difficulty. That brief was to convince me to make the necessary allocation of resources to retrieve the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder. Upon investigation, it became clear that the depth at which the aircraft was in the water, its location at a remote island, Norfolk Island, and the work health and safety standards applying to diving to those depths meant that there would have been a substantial cost of recovery.
The requirement was effectively that there be a decompression chamber, none of which was available on Norfolk Island, for the full time of the retrieval because of the depth at which the divers would be operating. When we got a reasonable and first approximation assessment of that, in the knowledge that, from our point of view, the key information we had about flight decision making would not have been recorded on the cockpit voice recorder which only had a two-hour time on it—
You got to say what a load of bollocks! And what about the FDR, surely the invaluable information that it holds over a 100hrs of ‘power on’ was worth the cost of retrieval alone??
Not sure about the FA2100 combined CVR/FDR but a lot of FDR’s these days have so many more flight system parameters measured/recorded.
Whose to say if fuel flows, fuel burn etc wasn’t recorded not to mention (as “K” said) actual winds aloft, ground speed etc..etc. Even PTT actuations, which could have possibly shown transmissions that weren’t received or recorded by ATC. The list isn’t endless but there is a 100hrs of possibly relevant information that is still sitting on the ocean floor.
Hopefully the good Senators are all over this because it certainly is an area that raises the stench of this whole Pel-Air debacle to an extreme level!
