Miners propel safer aviation standards

[Carrier]

Years behind Canada, Australian companies intend to act independently of aviation regulators to improve aviation safety:

Miners propel safer aviation standards (http://www.smh.com.au/business/miners-propel-safer-aviation-standards-20100127-mz1u.html)

Miners in Canada such as Cameco and Areva have been doing this for years. So has the Canadian oil and gas industry through Contrails Aviation Safety. Individual oil companies such as Shell have even higher standards.

[slice]

I don't think you will find any actual change to safety standards as such. This is just a standardisation exercise which should put an end to the individual customer audits ad infinitum.As the article says 12 audits doesn't give you 12 times the safety. All of the players in the Australian Fly-in Fly-out industry have their aviation safety department, each with it's myriad of requirements, standards, minimums etc. etc. I doubt there will be any change on the ground at Skywest, Alliance, Cobham, Network, Skippers etc.

[Carrier]

This situation is a sad comment on the competence of the aviation regulators in both Canada and Australia. TCCA in Canada and CASA in Australia should be setting aviation minimum standards that adequately protect the travelling public. They should be doing audits and inspections to ensure that all air operators maintain those standards. If they did this properly there would be no reason for private aviation auditors to exist.

The existence of so many private aviation auditors points to a serious dereliction of duty by the national regulators. Instead of paying for private audits, companies, aviation employees and passengers should be pressuring the politicians and media to ensure that the regulators they have already paid for through taxes start performing properly.

[john_tullamarine]

In a previous life our consultancy had an active role in FIFO audit and contract work up activities. The following comments are made with the caveat that current Industry practice may well not reflect that which pertained in the past.

Our observations were that the end user expectation varied quite significantly from the lower end (tick the box, "meet" the rule, but not terribly interesting in lifting the game at all) through to the more highly motivated miner who saw the corporate risk benefit advantages in raising the bar. These latter folk understood that the Regulatory minimima were largely irrelevant and that the better driver was appropriate corporate risk management decision processes.

A major problem which became evident early on was the need to educate the miners and their corporate hierarchies - very much a case of "not knowing what they didn't know".

The majority of the aircraft operators we audited were basically OK but, naturally enough, there were more than a few errors (most minor, some quite serious) picked up.

One which comes to mind involved a small heavy turboprop operation with quite seriously incorrect performance data provided to the line pilot folk. While I was able to track the problem down to AFM issues without too much effort, the otherwise quite competent tech services support operator folk had not all that much idea of some of the basics and the regulator .. well, let's just say that the problem had well and truly gone through to the keeper.

The point of this anecdote is not to blow my trumpet but to note that this operator routinely got audited by a host of "auditors" for the various mining and other charterers for which it provided services ... the problems which I spotted over a cup of coffee at an airport terminal waiting for a flight (and which were pretty serious) had not been detected over the previous however many years. This, and other errors in maintenance and related areas caused us to consider that many of the "auditors" were, at best, incompetent and, at worst, fraudsters. Often, the auditor was a retired competent pilot who was more than up to the mark to audit flightdeck and operational management related things but didn't realise that he was not the best person to audit engineering, maintenance and other non-pilot stuff.

To give the miner in this case its due, when I rang the head man from the field (and I do mean out in the field) and explained the situation, his immediate response was along the lines of "forget the audit for a while and fix the problem" .. mind you, he wasn't all that happy when the fix knocked the RTOW for a critical runway down to impractical levels .. just as well they had never had a failure out of that runway otherwise they might have made the papers ...

IF this present proposal means that the often incompetent auditors of the past are replaced with a smaller set of competent specialists, then the end users will benefit from real results and the operators will benefit by virtue of reduced time-wasting audits and a progressively improved standard of activity.

As a sideline note, the operator concerned above some years later introduced 737 and I was involved endorsing some of their initial management pilots ... several of whom recalled me from the (engineering side of the) earlier audit team .... at least, during the endorsement, when I talked performance matters in the groundschool and sim briefings, they listened quite attentively.

This situation is a sad comment on the competence of the aviation regulators in both Canada and Australia

With respect, I think that your comment indicates a lack of understanding.

The task of the Regulator is, indeed, to set minimum standards and it should, quite assuredly, audit to maintain those standards.

One of the corporate tasks of the (larger) charterer is to address a host of issues involving corporate liability, insurance, public perception, etc., etc., etc. Satisfying this requirement requires knowledge, understanding, and may well dictate a minimum standard considerably ABOVE that mandated by the Regulator.