Originally Posted by
MagnumPI
Old Akro, your post makes me wonder something that no-one I know has been able to answer.
At my home airfield there have been two serious accidents in the past couple of years. Both were non-fatal but the aircraft (both VH registered) were destroyed. The authorities were informed and I believe attended to interview people, but reports were never published.
So, what criteria has to be addressed for an investigation to happen and a report to follow?
Why is someone landing nosewheel first in a 182 at Bathurst considered worthy of a report but two near-fatal accidents not?
Short answer? Resources. So they pick and choose based on criteria available on the ATSB website. This extract was before BASI was amalgamated within the ATSB.
‘In recent years, the Bureau has adopted a policy of selective investigation, similar to many of our equivalent organisations in other countries. The traditional approach in Australia had been to investigate everything, no matter how minor. However, many categories of air safety occurrence are repetitive in nature, such as ground loops involving aircraft with tailwheel undercarriages, and no new prevention knowledge is gained by continuing to investigate such events. However, the law requires that all accidents and incidents must be reported. Because BASI receives all these reports, it retains the ability to monitor trends, and can initiate an investigation into safety issues raised – for example, by a number of relatively minor occurrences. While these events individually would not warrant full investigation, considered as a group they may be indicative of broader systemic safety deficiencies – a topic which will be addressed later in this paper.
In practice the Bureau does not distinguish operationally between accidents and incidents – they are all ‘safety occurrences’. The objective of selective investigation is to concentrate the Bureau’s resources on in-depth investigations, which offer the greatest potential to enhance air safety. BASI has developed and refined various criteria to decide which events will be looked at most closely – one of these is a primary emphasis on the safety of fare-paying passengers in any category of operation – high capacity regular public transport (RPT), low capacity RPT and charter, and other commercial operations involving fare paying passengers.
AVIA5022 The Purpose of Investigation – Edition 4. 11
In addition, in part enabled by the redeployment of resources as a result of the selective investigation policy, BASI is placing a much stronger emphasis on applied systems safety studies. This is aimed at identifying and rectifying underlying factors within the aviation system which can impact upon safety at the ‘sharp end’ – that is, in the cockpit, cabin, control tower, maintenance workshop, or on the ramp.’
Lee R. (circa. 1997) New Directions in Air Safety