we accept (in 2016) approximately 1235 people killed in fatalities on Australian roads.
The Vic road toll is very roughly 1 per day (and yes, that is considered too high and a lot of time and money is spent trying to reduce it). Road journey statistics are roughly 10 million trips per day and 100 million km/day. So that's 1 fatality per 10 million trips or 100 million km.
Per trip, Angel Flight is about 2000 times worse. If you guess an average Angel Flight of 500km, it works out to 40 times more dangerous per km than by road.
These
are bad figures. I am sure they will be scrutinised by the Coroner, as well as CASA.
If you want to protect Angel Flight and prevent extra CASA regulation, 2 things need to happen:
1) Acknowledge that there is a problem and
2) Take some pro-active steps to address the problem.
#2 could be as simple as setting some weather minimums for the trip.
e.g. for day VFR:
- No cloud forecast below 2000 AGL on the planned route
- No requirement for an alternate or holding in the destination forecast
- No more than scattered areas of visibility < 10km in the forecast.
- Arrival at least 1 hour before last light
The forecast could be checked at head office for each flight, and the flight cancelled if the forecast limits are exceeded, without giving the pilot the option.
This is nothing new. We
know what is required to make aviation operations safer. We know that pilots tend to push the limits and will sometimes pay the price if that is allowed. We know that setting boundaries well away from risky areas hugely improves safety.
I doubt that there are many commercial operations that work on the same basis as Angel Flight, i.e. no concrete guidance to the pilot other than obey regulations and use your own judgement.
Commercial operations are supervised by a CP, and have operations manuals etc. that set additional limits on top of the regulations for a reason. Angel Flight needs to learn from this, and take back a bit of the responsibility from the pilots.