Reece

A few months ago anybody in the industry could have been confident in saying that it would be most unlikely. Our excellent air transport safety record was ample proof that a training and checking system was in place that eliminated the majority of potential problems before they could emerge as accident statistics. Our generally benign weather, lack of high ground and relatively uncongested airspace were also bonuses that made flying in the lucky country a pleasure by European or North American winter standards.

However, that has now all largely passed into history as the airlines slowly begin to rebuild a new corps of aircrew in the aftermath of the pilots’ dispute. Unfortunately, Australia has now lost hundreds of highly skilled and dedicated pilots to overseas carriers or through premature retirement, effectively breaking up a system of command and double check that will be difficult to replicate.

Our pilots, whilst obviously (as history verifies) not big on industrial foresight, were big on applying safety standards that provided the best overall balance of schedule maintenance with a dedication to safety standards.

With a strong Australian Federation of Air Pilots, the pilots were able to ensure that safety standards were always met and indeed pioneered. That has now all gone as has the excellent benefits of the human factors oriented Aircrew Team Management training scheme that the then TAA put its flight crew through in 1985/86 (refer p96, Mar ’86 AA). Ansett had a similar scheme in place with the ultimate aim of both courses being simply to turn a cockpit crew of two or three members into a finely honed team rather than thinking as individuals and working without regard to each other’s capabilities – a certain recipe for disaster.

The objective of the course was naturally to avoid an accident or incident occurring in the first place, but if one did occur for the crew to manage it as a team to ensure that each member was able to give his maximum input of experience and knowledge to save the situation. You don’t have to go far to see the real world implications of this. Press photos of battered airliners in New York harbour and astride the M1 near the East Midlands airport are graphic reminders to professional and non professional alike that any inflight emergency needs to be addressed in a highly skilled manner if survival is the ultimate aim. The benefits of the airline sponsored human resources courses were many and it was a rare pilot or FE who left the three day course not feeling that he or she had indeed achieved a higher level of cockpit resources management.

That has now all gone as the airlines gather together an entirely new team of aircrew from diverse cultural and technical backgrounds. While these pilots are obviously also highly experienced, they will still have to go a long way to begin to replace, in real terms, the crews who flew before them. The fear, and we hope it never eventuates as anything more than that, is that a single mistake or misinterpretation in cockpit procedure will cause an accident that was indeed preventable. Without the AFAP to police and promote the individual carrier’s safety standards and training programmes, then there is always the possibility that upper level management ‘bean counters’ will cut funding for the safety and training departments when things get tight, as they probably will under deregulation and a projected lower level of uplift owing to the longer term ramifications of the AFAP’s actions itself. The same short-sighted dollar-orientated mentality that deliberately sanctions the elimination of overwing exits on several international airlines 747s can just as easily be evident in our own future domestic scene.

It is thus hoped that both Ansett and Australian will, once things have settled down, reintroduce their excellent cockpit management and human resources courses in an effort to begin to rebuild the high standards that Australian aviation had become synonymous for. The safety ramifications of the pilots’ dispute has already been the focus of a Senate report and it is hoped that in the years ahead our established carriers, and thenew entrants, will make safety and training standards a priority issue. For our own modest part, we will certainly be watching them closely