Too close for comfort.
Source: The Australian
An “unsafe” close encounter ¬between two planes near Mount Hotham Airport in Victoria allegedly placed up to 18 lives at risk, fuelling demands for better use of radar at Australia’s regional airports.
According to an incident ¬report obtained by The Australian, two Beechcraft B200 King Air planes on private charters from different companies — one from Essendon in Melbourne and one from Bankstown in Sydney — were vertically within 300ft (90m) of each other on September 3.
It appeared the Essendon-based pilot, struggling with a faulty GPS in heavy morning cloud and poor weather, did not know where he was and reported being in vastly different locations, varying by up to 20 nautical miles, within a short period of time.
Radar traces of this plane, chartered from small Essendon-based operator Seidler Properties, show an apparently erratic path at times, and that the scheduled 38- minute flight took an hour and 27 minutes.
The Essendon plane came within one nautical mile (1.8km) of the other aircraft and eventually landed at Mount Hotham, in the Victorian Alps northeast of Melbourne, but only after what the report by the other pilot ¬described as an “unsafe” approach from the “wrong direction”. There were three other aircraft also en route to the airport at the time.
The report, titled “breakdown of separation”, says passengers on the Essendon-based plane were so shaken they refused to return with the same pilot later that day, ¬requiring another to be flown to Mount Hotham to pick them up.
In a report being investigated by the Australian Transport ¬Safety Bureau, the pilot of the Bankstown-originating aircraft — a senior pilot at a major charter firm — describes the situation as “not safe”.
He suggests he is making the report not to attack the Essendon-based pilot, but rather to highlight an ongoing risk of tragedy in the absence of a safety back-up in cases of pilot error at uncontrolled regional airports.
“If this event did result in a midair collision, two aircraft would have been destroyed and 18 people would have been killed,” says the Bankstown-originating pilot in the report, sent to the ATSB two days ago.
“As a chief pilot, I am significantly concerned with the breakdown of (aircraft) separation caused by this incident. This is not a standard of operation that I would tolerate from my pilots and I do not accept that his event goes without investigation.
“Two high-performance aircraft with 300ft separation (vertic¬ally), within one nautical mile of each other (horizontally), in IMC (instrument meteorological conditions), is not safe.”
The incident has further highlighted the lack of radar control of aircraft to low altitudes at ¬regional airports in Australia, which The Australian has documented in the series of articles over the past two months.
In uncontrolled airspace, ¬pilots must communicate with each other by radio to ensure they remain safely separated, with no support from an air traffic controller monitoring them on radar or providing co-ordination.
At Mount Hotham, radar-based separation of aircraft ends at 18,000ft, below which pilots must self-separate, despite radar being available to a far lower altit¬ude.
Veteran aviator Dick Smith told The Australian the latest Mount Hotham incident highlighted the need to make full use of radar coverage at regional airports to improve safety.
“If they were using the existing radar for control at Mount Hotham, neither of these things (the -alleged mid-air near collision and subsequent alleged dangerous ¬approach) would have happened, because the controller would have told the pilot what was happening,” Mr Smith said.
He said it was particularly frustrating the existing radar was not being used to control aircraft to low altitude at Mount Hotham, given the deaths of three people in a crash there in 2005 and of six people in an accident at Benalla, about 150km from Mount Hotham, in 2004. He believed both crashes could have been averted had radar control close to ground level been provided.
“How many more frightening incidents like this before there are more unnecessary deaths?” Mr Smith said.
He said all that was needed to make use of existing radar for separation control to low altitudes at regional airports was for Airservic¬es Australia to provide more training to controllers at its Melbourne and Brisbane radar centres.
Airservices insist the air traffic system is safe and that levels of control around the country are appropriate for local traffic volumes and types.
An ATSB spokesman said the latest Mount Hotham incidents were being investigated.
However, an official statement on the bureau’s website refers only to the “unstable approach” to the runway; not the earlier alleged close encounter. Seidler Properties suggested it was unaware of any investigation and declined to comment.