Merged: Senate Inquiry

[Kharon]

Ah, yes; but.

Naughty Creampuff; I'd say most pilots (of all castes) their families and insurance companies would like to be able to believe that should an unfortunate event occur, every effort would be made by the responsible authority to recover all data pertaining to the event and would make a honest attempt to determine the cause and circumstances. If only to prevent a repeat. The prevention of recurring events should be a yardstick used to measure the effectiveness of not only the performance of the national safety agency' but the effectiveness of supporting regulation. I might add, we already spend significant sums attempting to do this. The disappointing results of the Pel Air incident reflect an abject failure to meet any of the mandated criteria, let alone contribute to improved safety standards. This from what should have been a straightforward investigation.

Although it seems like great fun, the notion of a privately funded venture, even for a team of the Norfolk pro's would be 'legally' problematic; or else they would have had the whole shooting match up on the beach by now. There are some 'serious' matters which need to be sorted, like jurisdiction, ownership, insurance, custody, provenance, chain of evidence. All those 'minor' irritations of the law (rules of evidence) which, despite the best efforts of CASA to ignore, could, I suspect become problematic. I don't know, but I imagine recovery would have to be Navy or police supervised. Anyway, something more than just a bunch of well meaning, non accredited, non aligned 'private' crew; just to ensure that there was no call of 'monkey business' from interested parties. We may even want to know if the box was serviceable, or even plugged in during the flight.

We would need to know and be able to prove that there had been no tinkering, before, during and after any data recovered was used in anger. The real expense is going to be analysis. We certainly cannot allow ATSB to do it; look at the R/T transcript again, we don't want bits and pieces of data being accidentally 'overlooked' do we?.

But, the physical act of recovery is not a problem. I expect that happy bunch of pirates on No-poke Island know, to the inch, where the wreckage is and have been keeping a watchful eye. Good crew out there.