Australian ATC didn’t know Melbourne flights were at risk for two years
A disturbing dossier of evidence as to the unsatisfactory and abjectly incompetent state of public administration of air safety in Australia is being assembled by the hard core membership of the Senate Standing Committees on Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport.
On Friday afternoon one of its key members, Senator Nick Xenophon (Independent SA) took a longer running exposure of dangerous practices by AirServices Australia at Melbourne Airport to a new level.
Plane Talking was unable to cover that hearing, but ABC journalist Melissa Clarke filed an outstandingly good report at to what happened here, and cut through the baffling complexities of the issue to render it understandable to lay readers.
It concerns the willful and/or incompetent exposure of the travelling public to unacceptable risks of collision of aircraft using a procedure called land and hold short operations or LAHSO at Australia’s second busiest large airliner airport.
Willful? Incompetent? Either AirServices Australia’s general manager for air traffic control Greg Hood knew what was going on, or he is a complete waste of oxygen being paid to be in a state of utter ignorance on such an important and vital part of his responsibilities.
If Mr Hood was that clueless at that level of responsibility, including as to how LAHSO became so corrupted at Melbourne in the first place, he needs to resign or be removed from that position forthwith.
What does he actually do to pull the money he does without being aware of such a dangerous failure of standards at Melbourne Airport? What does this tell us about the capacity of AirServices to even begin to understand its responsibilities, and why doesn’t it have any procedures in place to catch such operational failings. In short, what-the-hell-is-going on?
Does Mr Hood get off his backside and look in detail at the everyday running of AirServices Australia? If he does, how could he be so freeking hopeless at detecting what was going on at Melbourne Airport?
Could he produce timesheets that tell us exactly what he does and for how long each day so that the public at least knows how the money is spent? The focus of the Abbott Government is on public instrumentality efficiency. If it is as serious as its rhetoric, administrative timesheets are a must.
At Friday’s hearing the Senate committee queried AirServices Australia’s CEO Margaret Staib (above) over her alleged threat to call in the Australian Federal Police over whistle blowers or informers in AirServices Australia concerning safety or administrative issues.
A YouTube of part of her discussions with the Senators on this particular issue can been seen here, and Plane Talking thanks whomever it was who made and posted that and other related video clips on Pprune.org.
The essential element in Ms Staib’s responses to considerable questioning on said claimed threats was that she was referring to the improper public disclosure of commercially confidential material.
This is, Ms Staib, an absurd claim. AirServices Australia is a monopoly. There is no commercial alternative to what you are selling, so you have no commercial confidentiality to protect, and what you are really trying to say with your insulting contempt for the intelligence of the general public and even your customer airlines is that you want to call in the cops to punish the disclosure of a persistently inept and potentially dangerous management. For which you have been responsible for two years.
It would be good to see your threat carried through, assuming the Federal Attorney General didn’t intervene to prevent the excoriating process of a public court hearing, because this would be the pursuit of honorable people who have genuine concerns about the competency and culture of AirServices Australia, and such matters would benefit from exposure and testing.
It should be noted that the core membership of this Senate Committee in relation to aviation safety comprises Senators Bill Heffernan, Glenn Sterle, David Fawcett, Alex Gallacher and Nick Xenophon.
They are divided politically, but very united and determined when it comes to the public administration and accountability of CASA, the ATSB and AirServices, and have already uncovered some very disturbing truths about the two former bodies in relation to the Pel-Air crash embarrassment and the discreditable performance of the chief commissioner of the supposedly independent safety authority Martin Dolan.
They made a fool of the previous Minister supposedly responsible for aviation, Anthony Albanese, while the current Minister, Warren Truss, needs no help in coming across as hopeless, or hapless, in a portfolio that successive Labor and Coalition Governments just couldn’t give a toss about.
With reports as lucid and prominent as the ABC account of the latest Senate committee session on AirServices Australia’s performance, perhaps Cabinet will pay a bit more attention to safety implications that cannot be ignored or patronized away for much longer.
Reminder that tomorrow is D-day for the TSBC peer review report...
MTF...
