Issue 93: December 1993

Bad news, sure, and without doubt the last thing our CAA needed but it does indicate a positive aspect of the operation and that is simply that the Authority can and will open its mind to change if it perceives that it has perhaps got things wrong. That is good news by any standard and a far cry from the neanderthal, concrete minded bureaucracy that dominated (not served or worked with) civil aviation a decade ago.

As we forge into a new year though there is clearly an area of flying operations that has gone critically wrong over the past three to four years and that is the soaring accident rate in General Aviation.

To the general public it must seem that many GA pilots are verging on suicidal tendencies. If John and Joanne Citizen can catch a newspaper or television report on how pilot X flew on regardless of visibly (and often forecast) deteriorating weather whilst not even leaving a flight note with anybody then it is little wonder that GA gets so little public and political support when it is needed most. We get what we deserve, not what we demand, and at the moment that is very little indeed.

Clearly, a spate of pitifully absurd crashes in recent months highlights the fact that all GA pilots must now be forced to submit some form of mandatory flightplan to a person of authority in case they go missing. This doesn’t have to be as technical and consuming as those of yesteryear but surely it wouldn’t take a pilot long to fill out a CAA designed form showing aircraft type, anticipated POB, origin/destination of flight with any waypoints en route and some indication of time of departure/arrival, etc. No big deal, as every pilot must do this anyway in terms of their private flight planning. This sheet can then be faxed to a CAA 008 number or left with a person of credibility – local police or the party at the destination. Is this really such a big ask? Yet, spare a moment to consider the amount of wasted money that has gone into all these abortive searches in recent months. The lost Trinidad en route Bankstown/Mudgee at one stage used the resources of more than three dozen aircraft, an incredible waste of taxpayers’ money, pilots’ time and as witnessed several years back a golden opportunity for somebody to get it wrong and claim additional lives whilst searching for the initial crashed aircraft. How long do we have to tolerate this gross stupidity, this incredible lack of professionalism from pilots who should know better.

People generally like to be mandated into doing things that basically they agree with but often feel they don’t want to be the first to actually do. The compulsory wearing of seat belts in cars is a classic example. Quite a few people in the sixties had enough nouse to realise that it wasn’t such a bad idea to stop with the car rather than a millisecond later when you yourself would constitute a secondary crash into the instrument panel or worse through the windscreen. When belts were finally made compulsory, the day to day wearing of them became a non issue and the accident death and injury toll began to fall. The rest is history. Deep down, most pilots would probably feel more protected from themselves if they were legally obliged to file the simple, easy to manage flightplan advice suggested previously. It would then cut down tremendously on the massive SAR effort that has to go into play to even find these wrecks whilst the media quite deservedly has a field day in turning the community in general off GA The other thing that should happen is for manual and impact sensitive Electronic Locator Transmitters to be fitted to every aircraft other than ultralights and gliders. An ELT transmits a position report to a permanently positioned SAR satellite which then advises within minutes the exact position of the plane (or boat) that has gone missing. No need to have dozens of aircraft up, often in hostile flying conditions, searching in vain – you know where your problem is straight away and in the case of the recent Blue Mountains accident may have additionally saved two young lives. After all, isn’t this the 1990s? With the low cost high calibre technology now available why do we seem hell bent on reinventing the loss of the Southern Cloud every few weeks at taxpayers expense! An ELT can be manually activated or more commonly is set in motion by heavy G forces, such as at impact. The device is located in the tail, a part of the aircraft that usually suffers the least accident damage. Downside of the ELT though is that it can sometimes activate through G forces achieved by the aircraft during the course of its flight. Your editor was in a helicopter recently where a series of hard turns set off the ELT. This however can be overcome by general attention to detail on the part of the pilot through a modicum of that old fashioned thing called airmanship.

Several years back the CAA moved to make ELTs compulsory. They issued an ARP to seek industry comment (refer p14 Nov 93 AA) and barely three dozen people bothered to reply, almost all in the negative. Typical Australian apathy and a great tragedy as without a clear endorsement from industry (meaning you) the CAA cannot proceed to legislate. Times have changed though and it appears that both the CAA and Minister Collins are now moving to at least seriously consider the mandatory fitment of ELTS. At AA we feel this is more than a good move, it is a logical and obvious one. However the Government must do two things. Firstly it must remove the sales tax from such life saving devices as ELTs and secondly must allow the CAA to bulk buy a large consignment of ELTs to ensure a minimum onsale price to the end user. This could bring down the cost of a now $1000 international class 460 megahertz ELT by more than a third.

Certainly the combination of compulsory flightplans and the carriage of ELTs would do a lot for greatly reducing the time spent and cost involved in searches for people who mostly should have known better. The only way to reduce the appalling GA accident rate is to get serious about making pilots act as is their life depended upon their overall attitude to flying. It is regrettably clear to all that this currently is not the case.

Towards a Brighter ‘94

And so ends 1993. And many may say with some justification, good riddance! The coming year does appear to be the beginning of better things. Economic activity is trending slowly upwards, consumer sentiment is far stronger than just six months ago and hopefully the era of retrenchments will be replaced with one where people are actually sought as valuable workers, rather than replaced. Let’s hope so.

The small crew at AA would also like to take this opportunity to sincerely wish all our readers a safe and happy Christmas and we look forward to being of service to you in the year ahead. Take care.