Ten fatalities in 9 weeks?
 

In the latest Flight Safety Australia digest (Issue 129, Autumn 2020) on page 56 it lists the Australian accidents and incidents between 6 October and 16 December 2019.

A quick glance shows that there were 10 fatalities in the 9 weeks. This seems a staggering amount.

At that rate, with 15 times the traffic, the USA would have had 150 fatalities whereas the opposite page shows a total of 23 over 11 weeks (i.e. the equivalent of 18 fatalities over 9 weeks).

In the last 9 weeks appears there have been another 11 fatalities in Australia.

What’s going on?

If the rate of 10 fatalities in 9 weeks remains the same for a 12 month period, the total number of fatalities would be 58. It is absolutely staggering.

Hey Dick.

This is more on topic for the mid air over MNG but I have a little solution for inbound ADSB I am using right now. Its an RTL dongle, a raspberry pi and a screen. It runs gnuradio (built for ARM) and an HMI written in in python/tkinter. Obviously integrating a thing like that into an aircraft would not be completely simple but you could run it on a laptop and get good results.

One thing which I wish ADSB had is the frequencies being monitored by the aircraft. You could put that in the track label and know immediately how to make contact.

There is a wealth of information in ADSB but we are not really using it at the moment.

There's an even easier solution. iPad apps like Ozrunways shows ADSB traffic as long as you have a data connection. Perhaps we should be looking at ways to have a data connection in the vicinity of busy aerodromes?

Ozrunways has saved my a$$ on several occasions, the worst being out the back of Bourke with crossing traffic at the wrong hemispheric level, and a constant bearing. Without it, I never would have seen it it time, there was no requirement for either of us to be broadcasting our radio position, both VFR OCTA. It was just that we were both using Ozrunways, both had mobile reception and both had traffic on that prevented a conflict. It’s a big sky out there until it isn’t. Another plane I fly has a raspberry pi ADSB receiver that shows traffic even without Ozrunways on my iPad. Best $100 ever spent.

Clearly Australia needs more aviation safety regulations.

I also suspect CVD may have been a factor in these accidents, along with other medical conditions. It is to be hoped that AVMED will redouble its efforts to trap and cull these dangerous people.

The dataset is too limited


From 2008-2017 the fatality rate in GA in Australia was 11.9/million hours flown


In 2018 the fatality rate in GA in the USA was 10.2/million hours flown

Ideally we'd compare 2008-2017 in the USA data as well but etherway the numbers seem pretty comparable.

NB:PPRUNE won't let me post the reference links due to my low number of posts.

Irony.

Which appears to have been lost on you....

Data is not the solution and should not be relied upon or used as a guide to safe air navigation - don’t be disillusioned on that as it is unreliable when used in the way that you have described.

You need to use an ADSB receiver (starting at $300, such as the “Ping” unit), which will interface with OZRunways and Avplan. They are a separate 3rd party box.

Arguably if either of these aircraft had one of these with Avplan or OZRunways, they would have been able to see the other aircraft’s position.

A data based system as in 4g would not necessarily have signal and would not give the same results as the above set-up.

Do yourself a favour and protect yourself with 4G and ADSB-in as a bare minimum.

And what do you consider will be the most likely response to the number of GA fatalities in the last 12 or so months? The ways in which each of us tries to make the same points over and over again are matters for each of us.

You call it smart arse. I call it prediction.

LB: From experience, when complex systems fail, they don't do it gracefully. The damage may only appear very late in the process of failure when the structure of the system starts falling apart. One way of describing this is "hollowing out" from the inside, gradually the termites eat out the foundations and structural timbers of a house, then one day a gust of wind and the whole thing collapses. I would contend that maybe the entire aviation regulation and control system is starting to fail the same way.

A practical example was provided by the demise of Ansett Airlines. Its there if you ready between the lines of the special ATSB report. The owners cut too deep. They removed (fired) at least one layer of the maintenance planning staff, the guys who used to be led by Capt. Doug Kelynack, all old LAMES in grey cardigans who had encyclopedic aircraft knowledge and managed the process of assembling work packages, scheduling AD's, etc, etc. for individual aircraft. They may have also got rid of Les Hesses merry men, the maintenance schedulers. They grey men went, and with them the irreplaceable knowledge.

Nothing happened for at least three years, but progressively things weren't done that needed to be done. One day it was discovered that a critical B767 AD had been missed and Boeing wasnt granting extensions and when ATSB and CASA looked further in a special audit, NOTHING could be guaranteed about the maintenance state of the entire fleet. CASA had to pull the AOC. Ansett collapsed.

I suspect we are starting to see the end game of Australian Aviation regulation. But that is based on what other people are saying. I have no personal experience. The telltale signs as Dick points out are a creeping increase in the accident rate. None of these accidents are necessarily related except that each contains an element of regulatory failure somewhere in the layers of swiss cheese.

Underlying causes:
- poor leadership internally and externally by the regulator.

- a culture of blame and retribution internally and externally.

- an inflexible, hopelessly complex set of regulations, capriciously enforced. Developed not from a safety perspective, but from a government liability perspective.

Failure manifests itself as:

- failure of national safety systems systems. (airservices, Ansett).

- "pilot error" as an accident cause where the real issue is poor training and training in things that don't matter.

- Regulatory "Accidents" eg: discovery of Bristell certification gaps.

- Accidents caused by mistakes in operation, maintenance and overhaul related to bad guidance.

IF we are in an end state, the accident rate will continue to increase.

Not irony:

So Ansett failed because of an AD on a 767? Interesting.

+1 for Sunny's post. When the ship is running too well the bimbo management types will take it over and eventually produce the results you now see.

Big organisations need a Telstra veggie patch or ASA crisper to keep these people away from interfering with things that actually work.

I’d be grateful for some more info...I’m hopelessly non-technical and not sure if I understand what the Ping website is telling me. Is the $300 enough to cover everything. Can a mug install it?

thanks

kaz

In fairness to Lead Balloon, I am taking back my smart arse comment. I read what you wrote differently today (shouldn't rush to post at work), and just took it as you being a smart arse and throwing other issues into the fix for ****s and giggles. But I just re-read it tonight and get your point... let's add more regulation, that is all that will fix it. Hi Ho Hi Ho here comes Casa to save the show ;)

Sorry, I get it now, should have read twice before posting :ok:

Well, yes.

Your predilection with nailing Sunfish on anything he says is blocking your critical thinking. There were two shutdowns at two critical revenue travel periods. It is quite easy to see the affect this had on the airline. Of course there were other factors involved. But the handling of these events indirectly led to the collapse.

No worries and no need at all to apologise, GC. I'm not exactly "Mr Diplomatic".

I'm just a grumpy old fart trying as many ways as I can - sometimes confronting - to make some points about what's busted in aviation regulation in Australia.

AVIATION SAFETY INVESTIGATION BS/20010005
Investigation into Ansett Australia maintenance safety deficiencies and the control of continuing airworthiness of Class A aircraft

Page 10 of pdf, marked page ix:
Deficiencies in the Ansett engineering and maintenance organisation
The ATSB investigation found that similar deficiencies within the Ansett engineering
and maintenance organisation led to the withdrawal from service of the B767 aircraft
in December 2000 and April 2001. Those deficiencies were related to:
• organisational structure and change management
• systems for managing work processes and tasks
• resource allocation and workload.
...
The Ansett fleet was diverse and the point had been reached where some essential
aircraft support programs were largely dependent on one or two people. Hence it was
possible for an error or omission by a particular specialist to go undetected for a
number of years.
...
People and robust systems are two of the prime defences against error. Therefore, a
combination of poor systems and inadequate resources has the potential to
compromise safety. If a failure by one or two individuals can result in a failure of the
system as a whole, then the underlying problem is a deficient system, not simply
human fallibility.