Dick, I know what you are saying. And it is an interesting question, and provided me with an interesting diversion for an hour or so.

But I don't think that s9A is as all-encompassing as it appears. It talks of a "most important consideration" which I think someone above mentioned does not mean "only consideration".

Also, the legislation should be read as a whole. I think s9A "colours" further sections of the legislation.

Some of the case law talks about
"In reaching this conclusion, the Tribunal is mindful of the requirement in s 9A(1) of the CAA which dictates that a suitably cautious approach must be taken to assessing the risks posed to the safety of air navigation by ..."

and

"However, I am satisfied those provisions merely acknowledge the Parliament's intention that safety of air navigation has always been the principal end to be satisfied by the Civil Aviation Act 1988 and that end has now been expressed in clear words by the Parliament."

And policy that is not contradictory to legislation such as the one I lifted from the CASA website (and I assume there is a policy rather than a webpage) is relevant as well.

"In Re Drake and Minister for Immigration and Ethnic Affairs (No 2) [1979] AATA 179; (1979) 2 ALD 634, Brennan J observed that policy is a key factor in attaining consistency in decision making. Consistency is a desirable goal in administration, as the application of differing standards in the exercise of a power by administrators can only result in unfairness and a consequent lack of confidence in the executive. The AAT should therefore apply lawful policy unless to do so would work an injustice in the particular case or there are other cogent reasons for not doing so (2 ALD at 644-645). A similar view was expressed in Re Ruggeri and Secretary, Department of Social Security (1985) 8 ALD 338 at350. "

So, I would argue that a policy talking about ALARP and s9A are not inconsistent. And if ALARP is OK, then ETOPS should be as well...

You’ve left out the cost of “bringing [the quantified risk] under management”.

Let us assume that the cost of mitigating a quantified risk to the safety of air navigation is $1. Let us assume that the cost of mitigating a different quantified risk with the same consequences is $10billion. How can CASA choose to mandate the mitigation of one but not the other, when the safety of air navigation is the most important consideration in the decision? In this example the consequences of each risk are the same.

The safety of air navigation demanded that Dominic James not be reinstated to ATPL command privileges. The cost to him was completely irrelevant. Or so CASA said.

Dick,
This post tops any other of your loosely based neurotic posts.
Your engineer mate can have any position he likes on which aircraft he wishes to travel but it is no more soundly based than someone else’s view based on religion,politics,skin colour or sexual preference.

Next :hmm:

My whole intention was to show that affordable safety is alive and well.

I can see I have done that.

The act is clearly not complied with as cost is often the driving decision maker.

Sad they have to live a lie!

Lead. You clearly get it. Thanks

No.

Just because cost is considered, does not mean it is the 'driving' decision maker, just like saying that safety is the most important consideration does not mean that by considering other aspects, safety has taken second place.

I don't necessarily disagree with your view about affordable safety (as I mentioned in my first response), I just don't agree with your argument about the interpretation of the Act.

Dick, it depends on how you quantify risk.

The premis of your argument in the first post is that 4 engines are safer than 2 and as a consequence casa are not meeting their obligations under the act by not putting safety first.

The basis of this premis is that 4 engines are safer than 2 - is that a fair summation?

I could mount an argument that says the risk of engine fire in a 4 engine aircraft is significantly greater than it is in a twin. It stands to reason that the risk of fire is worthy of consideration and is a significant risk given that the potentially burning engine is located in an area where a fire induced structural failure would be catastrophic. Add to that the fact that the burning engine is directly underneath a fuel tank and the potential is there for the world to come apart. Additionally extra engines increases the risk of an engine failure. It stands to reason that the more engines you have the greater chance you have of one of them giving up the ghost at an inopportune time.

On the basis that most aeroplanes have two or three hydraulic systems, a bunch of electrical systems, a pressurisation system and a couple of redundant controllers, and mostly replicated and redundant systems, regardless of whether they have 2, 3 or 4 engines, there is a strong case that says the more engines you have the riskier it is, so casa may well not be complying with their safety first obligations by banning etops and mandating 4 engine aircraft.

So how is your question answered? Well with the use of probabilities and risk assessments that determine that, on balance, the risk is acceptable given a number of mitigators are in place - these mitigators being the rules around etops/edto.

As for your mate -well he is a dill.

Does he advocate the use of a man with a flag to walk in front of motor vehicles or fit passengers with parachutes or simply ban air travel in its entirety as that would be the safest course of action and without doubt meet CASA’s obligations under the act.

I am just a pax: a pax who sat at 35,000'+, in the middle of the night, over the middle of the Pacific, in a 777 for the first time, and consciously re-examined my faith in the ETOPS calculations.

The question sounds a bit bush-lawery. That is, there is surely no longer any serious question about the practical safety of ETOPS, so the question is about the wording of the legislation. That is a question about legal interpretation, not aviation safety.

I am no more a lawyer than an aviation professional, but from a common sense point of view, it would seem that the law would be complied with if the reasoning went like this:

-We want to operate twins over the Pacific, because cheaper.

-We see your point, but our principal objective is safety. Demonstrate that you can do this as safely as flying the Queen of the Skies.

-Engines have got a lot more reliable. Here is a metric merde-tonne of calculations and a set of regulations, beyond what is considered safe for normal twin operations, that support our point.

-You have persuaded us that your calculations are sound, and there will be no diminution of safety, so you may do this, unless/until experience shows we got something wrong.

Experience would seem to indicate that the result has been no diminution of safety. The last time I had an aeroplane on my avoid list, it had nothing to do with the number of engines, and everything to do with the type of batteries.

Meanwhile, the corporate culture of profit-maximization as the first priority (in all airlines) has me more worried than the number of engines.

SPECIOUS ARGUMENTS.


('MY WORD' Is a word game, played by people whose business is words.)


Did someone just say "dill" ? (whose self-editing is far from flawless.)


Why do the drafters of all these rules and regs use such appalling
terms as "appetite", presumably trying to colour the terminology as to whether or not the regulator is hungry for getting "the matrix" just right, on his plate.

But all that, and all that, is merely muttering in the wings.

And then why stop at 8?

Yes, so true! Also a lot of large twin engine flying all around the world, indicating how safe these aircraft are. Would be interesting to see how many flights suffered engine failure outside 60 minutes from a suitable airport.
2017 safest year for air travel as fatalities fall - BBC News

I don't recollect any DC3 ending up in the water when NAC operated the Coral Route.

Every Australian country town that has a FAR23 certified scheduled service rather than a FAR25 shows that CASA has put affordability as the more important consideration.

They are then clearly not putting safety as the most important consideration.

Pretty simple. I am not opposed to this.

Correction:
A four-engined jet could end up in the drink one day, too. B747 + Mount Galunggung (Indonesia) = quadruple engine failure.

I understand a Manila based TNT owned Bae146 freighter operating Singapore to Manila entered volcanic ash from Pinatubo and came within 2,000 feet of ending up in the South China Sea, before they got some of the Lycoming ALF 502's turning and burning again.

I stand corrected - Mount Galunggung, not Mount Pinatubo. Back to the topic...

The reality is that affordable safety is everywhere, and is unavoidably everywhere.

The problem in aviation regulation - particularly in Australia - is that the estimation of the probabilities of things happening - like a double engine failure on a 777 or an engine failure in a C208 or PC12 - are almost invariably grossly overestimated. The required mitigations are, accordingly, almost invariably a gross overreaction. It’s across the regulatory spectrum, from air operator certification to medical certification. The proposal for 20nm CTAF procedures is a specific, recent example.

The reason for this is completely uncontroversial and well-understood. The contemplation of awful consequences - like a double engine failure in a twin jet at 35,000’ over the ocean or a mid-air near a CTAF - results in a natural overestimation of the probabilities of it happening.

Dick’s aeronautical engineer - if he exists - is merely being what’s known as ‘human’. He intuitively ‘knows’ that a four engined-aircraft ‘must’ be safer than a two engined-aircraft. His knowledge and experience and objectivity go out the figurative window when he intuitively ‘knows’ the comparative risks.

‘Everyone’ intuitively ‘knows’ that pilots with CVD ‘must’ not be able to meet the same competence standards as pilots without CVD, and therefore pilots without CVD ‘must’ be riskier than pilots without CVD.

Of course, as a matter of objective fact, the intuition is bollocks. But it is natural (and, purely coincidentally, very lucrative for those who make their living out of safety bureaucracy).

Manifestations of this are everywhere. Look at the component overhaul and replacement periodicities in most GA aircraft designed in the 50s/60s/70s. My favourite is the flap flex drive shafts on Beechcraft. There are aircraft with 10,000 hours, plus, flying around with the original shafts. There are thousands of aircraft with multiple thousands of hours on original shafts. What do you reckon the maintenance manual says about the ‘life’ of those shafts?

And then I think of the poor bastard LAME whom CASA crushed for not having replaced vacuum pumps on a Cessna 310 at 500 hours. The pumps were still going strong after 500 hours, one by a further 886.9 hours and the other by a further 1,599.6 hours. But he had to be crushed because someone had plucked 500 out of his arse to put in a maintenance manual 40 years ago, and the number thus became holy writ the breach of which was a safety heresy. The objective evidence of millions of hours of vacuum pump operation and the collective wisdom of what causes vacuum pump failure were irrelevant. That’s aviation ‘safety’ for ya...

JMHO:

I don't think there is any question that any safety must be affordable safety - the only alternative is an outright ban. What I mean is, you can always make something "safer", by spending more or doing more. You have to draw a practical line somewhere.

We could have the passengers wearing crash helmets and fire-proof suits. That would have saved some lives over the years. We could be building aircraft components out of more expensive materials, and replacing them more often.

CASA needs to decide the rules, using safety as the most important consideration, but that doesn't mean "utmost safety", because that simply doesn't exist.

It needs to be acceptably safe (and in aviation that means a very low risk: no-where near the risks we accept in other areas of life, such as motor vehicles).

So of course CASA is invested in affordable safety, even if they don't use that phrase. If they weren't, they'd have to ban aviation in it's entirety.

But, Dick, using ETOPS (or EDTO as it now is, which also affects 4-engined aircraft) is probably not a good test case if you're mounting an argument to take up the tree. I'm sure you can find a better one.

As for CASA coming down to hard on GA etc, the problem is they keep crashing and killing themselves. The airlines aren't. So CASA have to be seen to be doing something about it. I think that problem actually goes further up the tree than CASA, it's the whole "nanny state" culture that Australia seems to have evolved into, from the top down. I don't know why, it just has. I wish I knew how to fix it.

D.S. is peeved. The bureaucrats are lying to him. (Is that such a revelation?)

He has his sympathisers and he has his detractors, obviously. (Did not even Jean Jacques Rousseau endure this, in his "brave new world"?

And do they not , too have their incidental place, those who are so world-weary, as to say, "go away"?

...those who are so world-weary, as to say, "go away"...
 

It's not necessarily "world-weary" but SMITH weary although weary is grossly understating things...

Apparently, there are a number of landing options over the oceans and I remember reading about various islands having [not great] airstrips.

Does that count?

Over 50 years in aviation and 12500 hrs worldwide.
Engine Shutdowns
2 Engines nil
3 Engines 1
4 Engines 2

Based on my experience I would say that twin engine aircraft are very reliable, engine wise.

SRM

Not to mention the Ansett NSW Fokker F50 glider!

To quote my previous post:

If you can accept that, then the question becomes where to draw the line.

Dick, I think that is what you are actually about... your views on airspace and mandatory ADSB have always been about where to draw the line (and with respect to ADSB, "when" to draw the line, as a cost vs risk equation).

I think perhaps where you need to be heading with this is not just cost vs risk, it's cost vs risk vs benefit.

That is, it should be a three-way analysis, not just a two-way analysis. The third being the benefit to aviation, the economy, and society in general. That is the bit that CASA seems to miss. That's the bit that the FAA seems to get.

Substitute the word "safety" in place of "risk" if you like, it matters little. I dislike the word "safety" because it implies black or white (safe or unsafe), and as you know there is no such thing. It's actually all about risk, unless you are trying to sell something.

Safety is considered. Twin-engined aircraft must operate to more onerous requirements than four-engined aircraft, so that the overall risk is considered acceptable. CASA do not say that 4 engines are safer than 2 engines, they say that 2 engines operated like this are considered as safe as 4 engines operated like that. They have made safety win over costs by insisting that the "less" safe operate differently. If they didn't care, twins could do what they want.

There's an engineer who won't travel on the jubilee line past westminster due to the lesser blast protection.

He has a point, but a stupid one.

A different spin on the topic of safety as regulated by CASA.
It has now become normal for Engineering managament to have zero aircraft maintenance experience or knowledge. This is approved by CASA. Once these non aviation people are approved to hold a responsible position they also then self regulate.
From my First hand knowledge decades of safety learnt from experience/mistakes/knowledge have all been thrown out the window with these people. For example they will have a satisfactory knowledge of EDTO as taught in a 2 hour course, and as can be read on paper in the MOE, yet will still try to find ways to spin the wording to ask an engineer to get an aircraft in the air when they don’t have a lifetime of aircraft experience to stop them walking into schoolboy errors due to ignorance, and the fact that holding a masters in aviation management means they choose to ignore hundreds of years of experience from people under them.
A big part of maintaining an EDTO approval is the maintenance section yet CASA project their audits in advance and it is now the norm for The same management to present a company pre audit checklist to be carried out within the facility prior to each advertised CASA audit to ensure a pass.

I guess what I am trying to say is EDTO is mainly about maintaining the aircraft to those standards, followed by the correct operation of the machine in the air.

A bigger concern should be that these aircraft are flown by the pilots, carrying unwitting passengers, with these types of unqualified people in charge and approved to be such by CASA. The equivalent would be having a chief pilot with not a single flying hour under their belt.

It is all good whilst people with experience can stand up and say no to these under qualified management. In 20 years with the millennial thought processes firmly in place there will be very few people in the industry with traditional safety first training still in the industry. Perhaps a spike in the graph will show up.

I remember an ad being run online and in newspaper for being a CPA which had a women who was in charge of a maintenance department at a airline who admitted in the ad that she had no idea what she was doing and she relied on those below her to 'help':ugh::ugh:

The point of the ad was where a CPA can get you but from an aviation perspective it was absolutely horrifying.

Derfred, I agree with the first two paragraphs of your post 57, but unfortunately your third paragraph really goes downhill. It says:

Yes, it probably “needs” to do that if it is going to comply with the Act, but in practice, clearly there are many cases when CASA does not decide the rules using safety as the most important consideration. There are times when it uses the marketplace as the most important consideration – as I have said in previous posts.

You state that “CASA is invested in affordable safety”, yet for some reason they like to deny this. Try to get someone within CASA to actually say the words “affordable safety.”

I think many have this belief that the Australian public are so stupid they can’t be informed as to the different levels of safety that are provided under the regulations. Of course these different levels depend on affordability. If we tried to have full FAR25 airline standard aircraft operating to Bourke, the cost of the air tickets would be too high and the service would stop.

You say an argument around ETOPS or EDTO is not a good test case in this particular matter. The reason we have these twin engine operations is not because CASA decided to make the decision, it is because the decision was made in Europe and the USA. Whether people at CASA wanted to differ was not the deciding factor. They simply had to harmonise with what the rest of the world was doing – or become a laughing stock.

I would imagine Boeing went to the FAA and said words to the effect, “We can get a lot more people flying if you would approve twin engine operation over remote areas, and we can make the aircraft acceptably safe.” The FAA no doubt saw the common sense logic in this. Fortunately, the FAA doesn’t have legislation which says that safety has to be “the most important consideration.” They realise there needs to be a balance between safety and participation levels.

That is what this thread is about. It is great to see that people are becoming better informed after just about every post.

If I worked for CASA I would be proud to say that there are a number of different levels of regulated safety based on the ethos of getting as many people as possible going by air travel which is safer than the road.

From the FAA website home page:

Our Mission
Our continuing mission is to provide the safest, most efficient aerospace system in the world.

Our Vision
We strive to reach the next level of safety, efficiency, environmental responsibility and global leadership. We are accountable to the American public and our stakeholders.

Our Values
Safety is our passion. We work so all air and space travelers arrive safely at their destinations.

Why are you blokes even talking about this.
Dick hears a story about an aeronautical engineer who won't fly a twin across water and it's turned into 4 pages of dribble.

Vag. That’s good marketing material.

Do they put safety in front of what the travellers can afford ? Clearly not.

What he said.

Dick, I see that you are not willing to answer michigan j's response. While the cases he cites are AAT and therefore not binding, the principles used in those cases are derived from the High Court decision in Project Blue Sky Inc. v ABA, which is most certainly binding. The case is the leading authority on the interpretation of legislation and I suggest that it be read before trying to embarrass CASA on this.

I understand what you are trying to do but posting what you believe to be rhetorical questions on this site are misplaced. Nothing will change in CASA until they are forced to change by political pressure.

Plovett.

I think what is important is what happens in practice. Over the last decade CASA appears to have been responsible for a one way ratchet in increasing costs on GA.

The unique ADSB mandate is just one example. And also part 61.

I have been told many times by CASA people that they do not have any legislative requirement to promote a profitable industry or get more people flying so they can benefit from a safer form of travel.

Seems strange to me that you say they will have to be forced to change. Why would they not want to change and get more people flying.?

Michigan and PLovett: If you can find an AAT or Federal Court matter in which CASA does not argue that section 9A(1) justified and was the overriding consideration in the decision in question, please post the link/s.

Spare a thought for the crew and pax on B777-200ER UA842 AKL-HNL 17/03/03. 191 mins on a single engine after nbr 2 engine was shut down.

Your argument is about as sound as; why does your insurance company allow you to fly a JetRanger when there are twin engine helicopters? Is it because they just want you to die?

The insurance company makes an objective assessment of the probabilities of having to pay out, puts a price and margin on that risk, and off Dick goes in his JetRanger and insurance cover. That’s a commercially-driven decision, not a safety decision.

Dick’s point is that CASA makes equivalent decisions, but pretends they are determined by safety considerations.

For example, there is no safety basis for the classification of operations. Passengers boarding a charter flight on a 9 seat piston aircraft and passengers boarding an RPT flight on a twin jet have no idea about the absolute and comparative probabilities of each aircraft being involved in a fatal accident. Amazingly, if the passengers on the first aircraft happen to be a patient being medevacd, and her husband, the flight is acceptably ‘safe’ at aerial work standards, but not acceptably ‘safe’ if they are just ‘plain old passengers’.

The classification of operations scheme results in some people being less safe than others, based on cost and practical considerations. “Cost and practical considerations” is long-hand for “politics”.

B772. You are stating that a large capacity airline aircraft flew for over three hours as a single engined aircraft.

No doubt during that three hours there was a chance that the single engine could fail.

Can someone provide details on what that chance actually was ?

Dick, I think I have pointed out a couple of times what I believe, broadly, is the error of your interpretation of s9A. The argument you are making is one with a foundation in the correct interpretation of the Act. Might I suggest that rather than bouncing ideas off PPRUNE readers, many of whome have a good practical appreciation of affordable safety and risk management, that you speak to someone who is a specialist in statutory interpretation. That is a barrister, preferably one who works in this area of the law. I am sure that with your background and resources that would not be difficult to do.

Regards,

TM

I don’t know why CASA is the focus of this thread. Every aviation regulatory authority approves ETOPS including the FAA which people want Australia to copy.