Aerial Ag – Safety systems a focus of new manual

The manual also provides useful overviews of risk management, threat and error management and crew resource management, while outlining popular takes on aviation safety from James Reason and Tony Kern.

The manual provides both the budding and experienced application pilot with the tools to build a system of personal safety and professionalism that will last their whole aviation career.

The manual builds on the strengths of previous editions, incorporates the latest research and calls up the experience of professional aerial application pilots across Australia.

Coming in at some 260 pages, the new manual makes extensive use of ATSB accident reports to provide a very practical outlook on safety. Many of the issues covered in the manual, ranging from wildlife strikes to wire management and aircraft handling are illustrated with experiences from the real world in an effort to break down the ‘it can’t happen to me’ denial of risk.

A great deal of the information gleaned from AAAA safety courses and AAAA’s interaction with application pilots – including practical tips that have helped individuals stay safe in their own careers – or significant lessons they have learnt when they got it wrong, has also been included.

The manual maintains a strong focus on human factors and their relevance to everyday operations, ranging from the difficulties experienced in maintaining short term memory and combating inattentional blindness when managing wires, to ensuring appropriate nutrition and hydration supports the pilot rather than handicaps them.

The manual will be mailed out free of charge to all AAAA members and will be available for easy reference on the members only section of the AAAA website. Any other pilot wanting a copy of the manual are advised to get in early as only enough copies were printed to cover the aerial application sector. Non-members of AAAA can purchase the manual from AAAA for $80.

Another recent safety publication release was a short booklet from the ATSB on managing wires in agricultural operations. The safety report highlights some of the steps pilots should take before getting into the wire environment and what they should be looking for to keep them safe when their mission requires low flying.

The ATSB report includes a useful ‘personal airworthiness’ checklist that all pilots should run through before flying. The US FAA’s ‘IMSAFE’ checklist is a neat way of consistently assessing your own fitness to fly. It represents another system based approach to ensuring good decisions for safe operations. A professional pilot wouldn’t consider flying an aircraft without a daily inspection, so why wouldn’t you apply the same approach to your own ‘airworthiness’?

The ATSB also indicates that of the 180 wirestrike accidents in the ATSB database between 2001 and 2010, approximately 45% involved aircraft conducting operations other than agriculture. This means that this publication is relevant to a lot of pilots other than ag pilots.

The ATSB report also confirms what AAAA has been training for years – most wirestrikes happen even though the pilot knew the wire was there.

This is where the new Aerial Application Pilots Manual comes to the fore – exploring the inter-relationships between visual cues, short term memory, inattentional blindness and distraction. The manual – and the AAAA training course ‘Wire Risk Management’ – also provide some ideas on how low-level pilots can manage themselves so they do not add to the statistics.

Constantly updating short term memory by use of a simple ‘wind and wires’ check at each turn and developing, improving situational awareness through the ‘Kern’ model of airmanship and developing and practising a refocusing plan to combat distraction are three key tools available to pilots to be safer at low level.

Professional pilots never stop learning and these two new publications should be added to every low-level pilots’ well-thumbed library.

AAAA Convention 2012

AAAA has just announced that its annual national Convention will be held in Cairns June 5-6, 2012.

Program and registration details will be on the AAAA website in the near future at www.aerialag.com.au .