So Creamy have you been able to track the changes/amendments to ICAO Annex 13? It’s not an easy thing given the convoluted layout of the ICAO website and the fact that they want you to pay for the privilege!
That aside the exchange between Senator Fawcett and Beaker, besides the semantics and legal meaning (I know that is your bag Creamy) of additional or replaced words, showed further indications that Beaker’s original decision was made on purely fiscal constraints. It would also appear that Fort Fumble’s decision as stated by the DAS in one of his retraction letters to the committee…
“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.”
….was a pivotal moment and was further highlighted by the ATSB IIC
writing in the prelim report:
From preliminary report AO-2009-072 released January 2010:
The ATSB has interviewed a number of witnesses and people who were associated with the occurrence, and is assessing the feasibility of recovering the aircraft Cockpit Voice and Flight Data recorders from the seabed.
The investigation is continuing and will include further examination and analysis of the:
§ meteorological information and its effect on the decision making and actions of the crew during the flight
§ fuel planning relevant to the flight
§ operational requirements that were relevant to the conduct of the flight
§ crew resource management
§ aeromedical flight classification and dispatch.
The remainder of the investigation is likely to take some months. However, should any critical safety issues emerge that require urgent attention, the ATSB will immediately bring such issues to the attention of the relevant authorities who are best placed to take prompt action to address those issues.
The bureau had already deployed the Victorian Water Police to conduct a surveillance/video operation of the wreckage on the 21/12/2009 utilising a remotely operated vehicle. This would presumably not have been a cheap exercise and probably used up a considerable amount of Beaker’s allocated budget.
This coupled with the fact that under the CAA and TSI Act (which is in variance to Annex 13) the only ‘flight recorder’ they legally recognise is the CVR. Plus as Beaker repeatedly states most of the relevant radio transmission information could be replicated from ATC recordings/transcripts…it was a ‘no brainer in the end for a beancounter like Beaker.
However it is still a fundamental error by Beaker not to consider the considerable valuable information that can potentially be derived from a FDR, you need look no further than the ATSB Final Report on the Lockhart River accident to see what I mean.
I wonder if Beaker’s decision not to recover the black box would still have been the same if with the same accident there had of been (god forbid) a fatality? Given that, other than a death, there would have been the same scenario of facts and evidence one would have to presume that the fiscally prudent Beaker would have made the same decision, or would a death maybe have changed his priorities?
Not to mention the inevitable scrutiny of a Coroner dragging over Beaker’s compromised Final Report!
I know that all government agencies are constrained by budgets but when our independent transport safety investigator the ATSB are having their investigations potentially compromised by a lack of resources/funds…well that kind of doesn’t ring true for me!
Note: Here are a couple of definitions from around the world on ‘flight recorders’.
ICAO - Flight recorder. Any type of recorder installed in the aircraft
for the purpose of complementing accident/incident investigation.
Singapore AAIB - “flight recorder” means any type of recorder installed in the
aircraft for the purpose of complementing accident or incident investigation;
EASA - (6) ‘flight recorder’ means any type of recorder installed in the aircraft for the purpose of facilitating accident/incident safety investigations;
They’re all the same and as Senator Fawcett states there is no compromise in any of these authorities in trying to recover the ‘flight recorders’, they are “gold” and the ‘holy grail’ of all good aviation accident investigators.
‘Feasibility’ isn’t because… “oh we can’t afford it”…feasibility is when your faced with a bottomless oceanic trench or the crash is in an erupting volcano…hence the reason that in the history of black boxes there has only been a dozen (from memory) that have been unrecovered….no Beaker has made a poor decision and one that may come back to bite him!