Golly Gee Dick...….

"Your Safety Will Be Enhanced And It Will Cost You Less".......
(The devil made me do it....honestly....)

p.s. Thanks for.........

I trust you put in a submission to rrat-sen, Sunny.
You statement about the regulator is correct.
We havent had an efficient, consistent, ethical and lawful regulator for decades and many have lost already.,Buckley, Butson Quadrio, and many, many others..
Its a national disgrace and the burden on the "common wealth" has been astronomical.
And the lack of interest in a vital industry by Governments aand a complete lack of governance over CAsA is disgusting.

Quote:

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It is perfectly OK if you’re Dick Smith & pushing an agenda (like he always is)...

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The problem with that is?

fatality rate
 

Accidents are caused by a huge number of contributing factors which are rarely the same. So in some ways they are independent statistical events.

As such they will actually occur in a random fashion and will not occur over a short period at the same rate as the long term average.

To see this try tossing a coin 20 times and note the sequences of H and T.

SB.

Sorry but that is simply not correct. I was at 501 the morning that PWC were appointed - it was Wednesday, 12 September. I can remember hearing about the Twin Towers at lunch time that day and then watching the TV coverage that afternoon at home (quite a few of us went for a stroll that afternoon). PWC subsequently ordered operations to cease at 2.00am on Friday, 14 September.

​​​​On the following Monday, the 17th, at the behest of the union, PWC got rissoled and Arthur Andersen was appointed. They reversed the cease operation and reverted to a trade on administration. The two Marks, who were the Andersen's administrators appointed, then decided to rissole Andersen and strike out on their own.

Agree with George about Ansett. I was working in the Victorian government at the time and pleaded for a rescue package. I was told to eff off, Canberra had determined that Ansett was a threat to Qantas and had to go.

George Glass, do you really believe that removing Flight Service and its $40 million cost a year was a bad decision? Who would have paid the $40 million per year since then? Something like $1.12 billion to be paid for by the people with the service available to them – basically general aviation.

In relation to CTAFs, what was wrong with copying the best in the world? Or do you think we should have remained unique in Australia, where each airport was on a Flight Service frequency and CTAFs did not exist?

It has ever been thus Dick and not just in Aviation. All the rest of the world is wrong, only Australia is right.
We could have had US or NZ rules for a couple of million, a couple of years to implement and had a safer system.
Instead we get our home made one's, half a billion in costs, thirty years and counting to complete and the collapse of a whole industry.
We are no safer for it, just a lot poorer.

I recall being told at an industry meeting by Airservices quite some time ago that towards the end when the flight service units and briefing offices at GA airports had closed that flight service was costing about $15m per year.

And then when they were finally got rid of, very little was saved because

1. the functions FS provided in class G/OCTA were transferred to ATC, who were paid significantly more and required additional staff and consoles to do the work hence ATC costs increased, and
2. the facilities used by FS e.g. FIA VHF outlets didn't disappear, they were transferred to ATC.

The thread title is "Ten fatalities in 9 weeks?" and refers to the period 6 October to 16 December 2019.

Can we adhere to that period or at least recent history?

We really don't need yet another repetitious regurgitation of he last 40 years of DCA/AsA air space management and service.

Please? :{

For those masochists wanting to relive the past, please use our Search function to find the multitude of previous relevant threads.

OOOHHHH C'mon 'Mr Tailie'...…

I wuz jest gettin' wound up.....

OH, awright……., I'll just bugger orf then...…

Cheeerrrsss…..

xx p.s. Thanks again Mr Richard Sir.......For the...….'Big R'...….

Back on topic...

For those who suggest “there is no statistical significance in [a] single event that contributes such a large fraction of the sample”, “events like these are stochastic until proven otherwise” and it’s not “appropriate to extrapolate accident stats like that”, I agree. There is that trite saying about lies, damn lies and statistics.

But if you’re going to criticise Dick for implying that there is some causal connection between the specific spate of recent fatalities and ‘something else’ - I note he only asked a question about what that ‘something else’ might be - you should be criticising the others that do precisely the same. For example, look at what CASA and ATSB did to justify the Community Service Flight kneejerk. Wrap your brain around this circular logic:Let us not entertain the possibility that waiting for “sufficiently robust data” might show that “being prospective” was really just “a kneejerk”. And strange that they don’t apply the same logic to HCRPT operations in and out of aerodromes in G. Apparently we’re going to wait for the collision that kills a a 737 full of fare paying pax before acting.

It seems to me that about the only valid conclusion that can be drawn about the accident and incident rate in Australia is that a few decades and a few hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ dollars lazily sunk into the regulatory reform program have had little causally positive consequence for the accident and incident rate. The program has produced a few millionaires, so I suppose that’s a kind of silver lining.

It seems to me that some people involved in aviation spend a lot of time and money bringing about changes that have, on balance, been generally beneficial for aviation. It seems to me that other people involved in aviation spend a lot of time and money producing little that is beneficial for aviation.

WRT to the comparison of the Ansett collapse to the current decline in Aviation, specifically the sacking of the crusty old engineers, have you tried to get hold of an inspector recently in the Melbourne office? Carmody et al aren’t replacing any inspectors who resigns, retires or walks out in disgust. And those who are left appear to be on sick leave, or seconded to other projects. Now taking months to get any applications through

Vref+5, doesn’t sound good. When TSHTF in an organisation, the scene is as you described. People leave and aren’t replaced, the rest are head down, trying not to get noticed. They know there is big trouble coming, well before senior management does.

The information I thought I saw - about CASA doing some IT based “transformation”, if true, is a desperate attempt to stave off organisational disaster. An IT solution to perceived problems is often proposed by managers trying to buy time and fix serious issues and it always fails.

The reason it fails is that if a business process is paper driven but “broken” then trying to computerise it just makes it worse. If CASA regulations are unclear now, just wait until a software architect tries to turn them into machine logic.

With the greatest respect, I suggest that this is not perspective, but, rather, irrelevancy.

With the greatest respect, I suggest that this is irrelevancy , but, rather, not perspective. We all have our own views on these matters, would I rather die in an aircraft accident or the many other ways Banjo mentions? Mmmmmm.......

The point I seek to make is that analysis of accidents is important and useful. Suggestions that you have to die of something (staph, domestic violence, sharks, etc) aren't helpful to me. Nor is the suggestion that dying in a plane accident would somehow be OK.

I suspect we agree on all of the above, we might just be stating our views in difference ways.

Another accident. 15 fatalities in 22 weeks?

The current system is not my system.

“ my system” if you can call it that is AMATS or NAS.

I have always been opposed to the present system where VFR aircraft have to monitor an endless cacophony of calls that are irrelevant!

No monitoring required if you have ads-b out and a cheap adsb-in device with relatively basic software to display conflicts!

I have never thought that safety was hard. After all, I never met a pilot who thought that they wanted to kill themselves or an engineer that knowingly pushed an aircraft to the line knowing that it had a catastrophic fault. I have known operators who would push their pilots to perform acts that were dangerous and I have known pilots who managed to kill themselves by being utter tools. However, generally most pilots wanted to arrive at their destination alive and by so doing so would their passengers.

I no longer fly, gave it up several years ago and have not missed the experience one iota. That is thanks to CASA but that is irrelevant as are they. What I did notice was that as pilots would gain experience they would begin to cut corners. Not literally but in safety margins. I human factors it is referred to as the "normalisation of deviance". The operational safety margins would get shaved and that new margin would become the new standard. Then that standard gets cut and so on and so forth until one day it ends in tears. My last few years before retirement were spent as safety manager for the last company I had flown for. That erosion of safety standards was my single biggest prevention issue.

In private operations we have an ageing GA population (several years ago in the USA the average age in GA was 59 I think) and with increasing expense of flying maintaining standards gets more expensive and easier to put off. I flew for 6 months in outback SA and was appalled at the safety levels I saw among some of the private flights coming through. In many cases a total lack of preparedness for outback flying. "I have a GPS - don't need maps" approach was common. What I read of many crashes makes me think that a degree of caution was not applied to the flight. Whether this was due to ignorance or allowing a deterioration in standards I don't know (leaving aside the Mangalore mid-air - that may far more complex) but ultimately safety is in the pilots hands and decision making.

p.s. The Ansett demise started way before the change of ownership. It has its roots back in the 2 airline policy days.

Slightly off topic but referring to Ozrunways, was IFR Archerfield to Tamworth a few days ago and needing Ozrunways front and centre. In cloud, if you put down the screen brightness a bit too much ( fat fingers and turbulence ) the damn thing goes black screen and you cant see the icons to restore. The thing about ozrunways dimmed and bright white cloud around the cockpit is that you just can't seen the screen. No way.
A bad day, but a blown tire inner tube on landing then off the runway put the rest into perspective.

Don't know what is going on exactly but re GA I have concerns re future recurring issues with some GA ( esp training ) aircraft having some bad slow speed habits ref Bristel, Aquila, Liberty, Diamond and many others that look o so sexy and glossy but are not up to slow speed safety. I mean, some of these AC when slow flip a wing down, then the nose down before you can blink and then if you are low, goodnight. The reports are out there.
Contrast this with the Jabiru that CASA tried to force off the map, which has full control authority thru the stall. I think C172s etc also are relatively safe.

I think CASA should spend more of their resources talking to prospective flying schools re suitable aircraft.

In that case you can pull out your torch and shine it at the screen to find the slider button.

Liberty! Lol, ugly brother from another mother :-) I owned one and even then I didn’t like it!

I got rid of mine due to the “finger” brakes. I had bad tennis elbow at the time of owning it, with no end to the condition in sight and they wanted around $12k to upgrade to the traditional toe brakes, so I moved it on.

There is a difference between something that meets the airworthiness requirements and what many would consider to be a suitable trainer.

CASA didn't even bother doing that when they introduced Part 61 with the suite of incipient spinning exercises and CASA knew that only types approved for intentional spinning could do them.

That is exactly what I did.
Still hard to see but that is what worked.
Rumaging down the back while IFR in cloud for the torch was character building.
I emailed ozrunways following day, not a lot of sympathy, they cited the need to dim down at night.

Wow, that is a gen Z problem.
Ozruways and Avplan are the greatest safety advance in general aviation in the last 30 tears.

I am not Gen Z.
More likely Gen steam

2 more north east of CBR . RIP .

Replying to my own post and probably no one is going to read this but...
the solution to over dimming Ozrunways (and not being able to get it back again ) while in IFR in bright sunlight, cloud etc is to put a white paint dot (eg whiteout typing paint ) on your iPad metal surround that is just adjacent to the brightness icon position, then if you cannot see the dimmed icon you place your finger just next to the paint dot and then move the slider to the right ( which you still can't see but it will be there )