Pilots, victims’ families call for change as planes fly blind
The Australian
May 30, 2015 12:00AM
Cruising at 400 knots in private jet luxury at 37,000 feet in his “pocket rocket”, an elegant Cessna Cita*tion, businessman and aviator Dick Smith receives the comforting voice and instructions of air traffic control in Brisbane, directing his every move and keeping him and his three charges on board out of danger.
But passing down through 8500 feet on the way to Ballina on the NSW north coast, air traffic control leaves the plane to its fate. The rules dictate air traffic control can no longer direct it below that altitude. The aircraft and its four souls are on their own in “uncontrolled airspace”.
There is no fully fledged radio operator at Ballina and, unlike in the US, firefighters on the ground at the airport are banned from providing air traffic information.
Smith changes radio frequencies so that a system he calls “the blind calling in the blind” comes into play: pilots of different aircraft talk to each other to try to work out their relative positions and maintain separation.
“If we’re in cloud and … on a heading to fly into a mountain, then the air traffic control system just says, ‘well, you’re just stupid’ — they won’t let you know, even though you’re still on their radar,” Smith says.
Smith’s friend and co-pilot on the flight to Ballina, former US Air Force F-16 fighter pilot and airline captain Richard Woodward, says the Australian system “drives me nuts”.
“You’ve got this very advanced national air traffic control system but, instead, you have pilot*s flying around in clouds saying to each other, ‘Hi, I’m here, where are you, let’s work out how not to crash into each other’,” Woodward says.
Benalla in Victoria is seared in the minds of aviators. It is where six people died when the plane they were flying in from Sydney crashed into a mountain in July 2004.
Sydney chipboard company executive Robert Henderson was one of those killed. His brother David says the accident could happen again because of the refusal of authorities to apply controlled airspace procedures wherever possible.
“It’s simple. I can’t see any reason why you should not have controlled airspace where there is radar coverage,” Henderson tells The Weekend Australian.
Robert Henderson died along with his daughter Jacquie, 33; her husband and Blackhawk pilot in the Army Aviation Corps Alan Stark, 37; friend Belinda Andrews, 33; Qantas jumbo jet pilot Geoff Brockie, 37; and pilot Kerry Endicott.
David Henderson, who chairs the family business, is himself an experienced pilot, having at one stage flown the company-owned Piper Cheyenne to Benalla, where the company has a plant, as often as once a week.“If we can prevent just one accident in the future, it’s worthwhile,” Henderson said.
Investigations found the GPS navigation system on the Cheyenne had a fault, taking the aircraft on a track about 30km to the east of the correct one, in rain and low cloud. The aircraft was on air traffic control radar screens, and on two occasions an automatic alert warning informed air traffic controllers it was off-course.
The air traffic controllers ignored* the warnings and did not inform the pilot — possibly, according* to an investigation report, because they wrongly assumed* the pilot was tracking to another navigation point.
Smith says he suspects the controllers knew that, once it flew below controlled airspace, they would have no authority to direct the aircraft anyway.
One of the things Henderson and Smith are bitter about is that, at the inquest, Smith was not permitted to give evidence after barristers argued against it.
While aviation authorities say air traffic controllers were retrained following the accident and new procedures introduced, Smith claims the fundamental problem of “unnecessarily uncontrolled” airspace remains.
In the US and Canada, the system of uncontrolled airspace for commercial aircraft was done away with decades ago. Aircraft are, essentially, always under the direction of air-traffic control, even where radar is not available. Where it isn’t, procedural controls can still apply.
About a decade ago, the then Coalition government announced it would switch to the US system.
In April 2006, Nationals MP Warren Truss, now Deputy Prime Minister and Infrastructure Minister with portfolio responsibility for aviation, wrote to a constituent with the reassurance that the *government’s airspace policy, the National Airspace System, was “designed to introduce the benefits of the US airspace model”.
Some airports such as Coffs Harbour, in northern NSW and with about 350,000 passenger movements, are under designated controlled airspace. Coffs has a control tower. Ballina, with about 430,000 passengers, does not.
A Civil Aviation Safety Authority spokesman says the agency is required to assess changes to airspace based on risk, “not hard triggers such as passenger numbers”.
A spokesman for Mr Truss says considerable improvements have been made to the air traffic control system over the past decade.
“The current Australian Airspace Policy Statement was last updated in 2012 and incorporates the features of the US and European systems which are appropriate to Australian flying conditions,” the spokesman says.
The CASA spokesman says that issues relating to the airspace system are not “regularly or repeatedly being identified as the cause of accidents or incidents.
One absurdity, according to Smith and Woodward, is that restrictive rules stop Australian airports from introducing a US system in which various service providers, such as fire and rescue officers, provide pilots flying in the area with local weather and traffic information.
At Yampa Valley Regional Airport in the US Rocky Mountains, the fire and rescue officers routinely enter radio contact with aircraft as they approach.
They provide the pilots with wind speed and direction as well as information from what they can observe, such as the height and look of the clouds. They can also say what is happening on the runway.
Yampa Valley airport manager Kevin Booth says the firefighters liked the role.
“They have to be there anyway, they are in a great position to see what’s going on, and it gives them great pride to provide the service,” Booth says.
Just months ago, Airservices Australia put in a $13.5 million fire station at Ballina that has a viewing area that looks like a control tower, manned by 17 firefighters operating in shifts. But there was, apparently, no money left over to provide a Certified Air/Ground Operator, or CA/GRO for the airport, who would be authorised to provide detailed weather inform*ation and local air traffic movements.
Civil aviation safety regulations state CA/GROs “must hold, or have held within the last 10 years, an ICAO recognised Air Traffic Controller licence or an Australian Flight Service Officer licence”.
The rules do not completely prevent other airport employees, such as firefighters, from talking to pilots* over the Unicom radio system, but restrict such conversations to the most basic of information. The rules ban any discussion of air traffic.
The Airservices spokesman says allowing the Ballina firefighters to provide local weather and traffic details to pilots “is not currently being considered”. He would not say why not.
The CASA spokesman says Unicom services in the US do not provide traffic information services, but this is directly contradicted by Booth, Smith and Woodward.
Smith says that if ground staff at the small Lockhart River airport in Cape York, who were not air traffic controllers, had been required to have standard radio contact with approaching aircraft, 15 people might not have died when a Fairfield Metroliner crashed into a mountain while approaching the airfield in bad weather in May 2005.
The manager of the airport, Manfred Kranabetter, who was at Lockhart River when the crash occurred, says that had the pilot contacted ground staff as part of a standard routine they could have told the pilot that a mountain on his intended approach was obscured by cloud.
“But I only provide information when I’m asked,” Kranabetter says.
Smith is incensed about the uncontrolled airspace and the radio operator restrictions. He has focused his ire on Truss. Yesterday, he wrote a letter calling on him to fulfil the Coalition’s commitment to introduce the US system — or resign.
In coming weeks the multi-*millionaire will hold public meetings in Ballina and Hervey Bay, in Truss’s southeast Queensland electorate of Wide Bay, which also has an airport designated to be in uncontrolled airspace.
At an impromptu meeting at Ballina airport this week, Smith told Ballina Byron Gateway Airport manager Neil Weatherson: “I might frighten the hell out of the people who are going to be flying here.”
In his letter to Truss, Smith quotes a Virgin Airlines pilot who described on an anonymous pilots’ blog how on one occasion several aircraft at Ballina were flying around the airport in cloud and rain, jamming the radio waves as they frantically tried to work out where each other was and how to avoid colliding.
“It was an absolute mess in terms of the radio,” the pilot, who spoke to The Weekend Australian on condition of anonymity, says.
“Quite frankly, it was a significant safety-of-flight issue.
“I find it quite extraordinary that we have at Ballina a new fire-rescue service to deal with an accident, but we have no risk mitigation in place to stop it happening in the first place.”
The CASA spokesman says regulation requires aviation fire services to be installed at domestic aerodromes that have in excess of 350,000 passenger movements.
As manager of Ballina, Weatherson says he would be happy for the airport to be brought under controlled airspace, eager to set up a full radio operator service, and quite content for that to be handled by the fire-and-rescue team.
“I’d love to have a CA/GRO … the issue is who pays for it, and how to recover it,” he says.