turboplanner

Macarthur Job passed away yesterday after a battle with cancer.

 

He was arguably one of the greatest contributors to aviation safety in Australia.

 

His Aviation Safety Digests left no stone unturned, and what I liked about him was that he always dug into the history of the pilot involved in the crash, and often turned up a lurid history of, for example the pilot killed after flying into cloud regularly taking the same risk on a number of occasions previously, and boasting about it - so you knew it was more than an innocent accident.

 

His dedication and persevering touch is what is lacking most in the publications of today.

 

He was a great airman who taught great airmanship.

 

Here's a link to some of his history (Search for Macarthur Job if his name doesn't come straight up).

 

http://www.airwaysmuseum.com/

 

 

Thanks, Turbs. Yes, the experimental warning placard and briefing, warn the passenger that the aircraft does not comply with normal safety standards, and that they fly in it at their own risk. This does not of itself address negligence. However it does establish that flying in the aircraft is a dangerous recreational activity; and by definition, the clauses in the Civil Liability Act means that no redress can be made in regard to negligence. So under those conditions, the passenger has no come-back, I believe.

The warning on the placard applies to the AIRCRAFT, not to you - this was discussed in detail in the Thread Public Liability #87 Noel Campbell v Rodney Victor Hay where the defendant succeeded because he warned the plaintiff about the risk and was not personally negligent in his actions. If he had been negligent, such as engaged in low flying/drunk/mistake during preflight etc the case would have gone off in a different direction.

 

If you are referring to the Queensland Civil Liability Act:

 

Clause 14 "Presumed to be aware" - the above case fits that

 

Clause 16 "No liability for materialisation of inherent risk that cannot be avoided by exercise of reasonable care and skill"

 

That doesn't absolve you from contributory or culpable negligence.

 

Clause 19 "No liability for personal injury suffered from materialisation of an obvious risk of a dangerous recreational activity engaged in by the person suffering harm"

 

That doesn't absolve you from contributory or culpable negligence.

 

We both grew up immersed in the prescriptive era where we looked for a rule, and made sure we complied with it; if I can cross over into a daily life where I've become responsible for the prescriptive rules, so can you.

 

 

You are all looking for a prescriptive rule to operate by.

 

Prescriptive rules and regulations are dying out because the people who make them are liable for their advice, and they can never be comprehensive enough to cover all theoretical events, whereas duty of care can be assessed retrospectively based on what actually has happened.

 

I understand what you are looking for Andy, but unfortunately you are looking for a way that you won't have the duty of care for safe operation of an airfield.

 

While nothing happens nothing happens, but if someone is injured or killed you become the candidate who had a clear duty of care.

 

If the rule was was taken out of 4.01, the plaintiffs would still be asking "Who was in charge?, Who had the responsibility?"

 

 

All some people need is the little prompter to remember, so very useful post OK.

 

 

Good post FV

 

 

As anybody with a basic understanding of four-stroke engine thermodynamics knows, there is bugger-all heat transfer through port flow in the exhaust port.

I didn't mention anything about heat transfer through port flow, nothing, and nothing to do with it.

 

 

So without reading though the whole 9 pages, has the actual cause of this engine failure been discovered..?

The Pilot would hardly have had time to get depressed at the loss of his aircraft, retrieve the pieces and start to pull the engine down, but his description of 9 years of reliability then the engine starting to run rough, matches a number of other stories which ended with through bolt failure - my pure conjecture.

 

For those who have drifted into the discussion on cooling, failed exhaust valves etc. I posted this thought piece on another forum this morning. I had similar combustion issues with a race engine for a couple of years, and solved the problem after understanding where the heat was and how to get rid of it.

 

Get an old exhaust valve, heat it gently with an oxy torch until the temperature is 200 degrees C measured with a probe thermometer. It should look much the same as when it was cold.

 

 

 

 

 

In a water-cooled engine this temperatures are significant because sensor usually are tapped through the head to measure the water temperature, and as we know the boiling temperature increases with the pressure we can obtain in the cooling system. If we lose pressure the head temperature goes up and the head usually warps.

 

However the exhaust flow is deeper and directly in the flame front of the combustion chamber, where operating temperature is around 1,000 to 2500 degrees C – a different environment.

 

Get the oxy torch on the old valve again and take the temperature up again – steel usually starts to get soft around 538 degrees and melts around 1370 to 1540 degrees C, so in this experiment you’ll be able to roughly find where the material for this valve would start to burn away.

 

If the valve is deforming at the low end of the scale, you can look at better valves, if not, then the flame front may not be clearing fast enough from the chamber to allow cooling before the valve starts deforming and shedding.

 

You could use the percentage difference say between 180 and 200 on the gauge, but it’s not terribly representative of what the flame front is doing.

 

 

If GA pilots are not obligated to do this then RAAus should not be obligated. If individual Airfield management committees who are best placed to manage their own liability exposure choose to do this then all who play at that airfield need to comply and not just some because of the colour and style of license/certificate.

You've said it yourself; neither you nor Yenn have seen anyone. So what? what about the rest of the Country?

 

I also haven't identified either of you as scholars of all the CASA documentations and rules. The claim that GA Pilots are not obligated to do this is just an assertion, nothing more, and may well be buried in the documentation or referred to obliquely like many other of CASA's policies.

 

You left out the part of the 4.01 clause that says....."in accordance with conditions set down by the owner of the field.

 

So all this bleating is about is that if more than one person is operating in the circuit someone has to take charge and represent the owner through his set down conditions.

 

That to me is prudent safety action, and if the CASA position is unclear then that is the one which should be fixed.

 

You have heaps of information on this thread to get the clear understanding that operating an airfield with no one in charge is going to end very badly if there's an accident.

 

 

Queensland

 

 

Friend of mine has a Chamberlain with the 100 km/hr road gear Kaz, and that's into a head wind!

 

 

Chain of Responsibility fine

 

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/breaking-news/trucking-giant-slapped-with-record-fine/story-fni0xqi4-1227010421573

 

Transport owner charged with manslaughter for gross negligence

 

http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/south-australia/trucking-proprieter-peter-francis-colbert-54-charged-with-manslaughter-over-happy-valley-crash-that-killed-robert-brimson/story-fni6uo

 

 

but failed, because it would make CASA liable at the point of sale

In Australia, governments have been very careful to distance themselves from claims; you are looking for an academic definition, but in the cases I've seen the lawyers have come after all the people who were responsible for the product and sold it, accidents can happen when the first piece of aluminium is delivered, although CASA are in a unique position of interfering in our business so could sometimes be a co-defendant right back at the design phase, and after the sale in the servicing and operation of the aircraft, and they can paint a big red target on their backs if they know something is wrong but still allow it to continue. The auto industry operates directly from the base Department which we did in the Department of Civil Aviation days, and that's the safest option for the government.

 

However, that does not, so far as I can see, carry over to the question of carrying somebody at no cost, simply for their pleasure, in the spare seat in an experimental aircraft; there could hardly be a more obvious risk (apart, perhaps, from bungee jumping) and the placards and briefing required nail the lid on that, I think.

Kaz was talking about Victorian law and I'm not a lawyer and can't get into detail, but the plaque is a warning so the person getting into the aircraft can't claim they were expecting the same level of near absolute safety that Qantas have achieved; it does not absolve you from a negligence claim if you are negligent. I've previously posted my experience losing one case because we advertised an event as a family event and someone was injured, then losing another one because we were negligent but in particular hadn't made it clear the plaintiff had the right to sue.

 

If for example you were operating out of a property with forest all round the strip offering no place for a successful EFATO, and the passenger was killed as you came down through the trees, you could be prosecuted under the crimes act as a softener, and then sued for negligence on the grounds that you had a duty of care to ensure the airfield was safe.

 

However to get answers to your questions which carry any weight you need to sit down with a PL lawyer with a list of questions. In the briefings I've had, I've found the explanations reasonably simple.

 

I'm posting a story on the thread "Public Liability" about a Company Owner charged with Manslaughter after allegedly failing in his duty of care to maintain effective brakes, and a story on a huge Chain of Responsibility Fine.

 

 

If you call in and collect me for the trip I'll give you that wind generator I'm keeping for you. That will also avoid you getting lost out there in big country.

He's already a hot air generator Kaz; if the two of you fly over, I'll take my International B275 tractor with a trailer for spares, fuel etc, and scout ahead of you each day for landing sites.

 

Whereabouts in the South East Kaz?

 

 

I'm still amazed that the endorsement system was dropped; it's not only CPL's that are a worry, but the rest of us butchers.

 

 

The way I see it that has been unravelling for some time, so its possible the same process, CoR will be used to clean it up. You can see the strong resistance to responsibility in this thread and any other safety thread, in the reluctance of board members to set up safety structures like other Associations andso on, so the signs are there that a more formal approach will be required sooner or later. It'such more preferable if this is done without being triggered by a collision with a QLink or something similar; working to a deadline of days is not a nice experience.

 

 

This is a reasonably comprehensive explanation of the negligence and TPA coverage of Product Liability

 

http://www.claytonutz.com/downloads/TheInternationalComparativeLegalGuideto_ProductLiability2008.pdf

 

Additional legislation, like the US Product Liability laws where a Judge applies punitive sanctions against a manufacturer - usually around $10 million per shot, was introduced in Australia, I think in the mid nineties, and I can remember being briefed on it by the company lawyer, who said it was not likely to be actively used until the first case went through the High Court, and that hasn't happened yet. I can't remember any of the details.

 

Yes, compliance with ADR's is a defence, so vehicles are now not modified away from ADR compliance, except by low volume compliance, or State Signatory compliance.

 

The Motor Vehicle Standards Act 1989 called up the ADR's and effectively ended the import of cheap second hand cars into WA. I argued for the name of the Bill to be changed to Motor Car Standards Bill to avoid low volume truck production being caught up in it but lost.

 

Trucks then became an issue, because every one of them needs to be modified to carry a load which will still ensure compliance. So the Motor Vehicle Standards Act called up a National Code of Practice, and if you complied with this you had the same protection as the ADR.

 

Operation of compliant trucks also became an issue because by incorrect loading you could take a truck outside its ADR compliance, and that was covered by the Load Restraint Guide.

 

So we finished up with a nesting group of regulations which has seen a huge reduction in truck accidents, but a number of extinctions of vehicle types such as Long Tom steel carriers.

 

It became obvious after a few years that not everyone was playing the game on the Code of Parctice, so we got the Road Safety (Vehicles) Act 1999 which mandated the Code of Practice

 

(which by now had morphed into Vehicle Standards Bulletins) into law. (Victorian Act - each State had its own Act to do this)

 

Even after this, there was a big percentage of truck suppliers and body builders - around 40% - who just continued to build now-illegal trucks.

 

People continued to die so Chain of Responsibility legislation was introduced to bite the management chain up to director level, and once the Chardinay set began to be prosecuted, compliance took a remarkable step forward to the point where only a few non- compliers exist.

 

I can see a parallel to this trend right now in RA and GA, and with CoR being so successful, you can look forward to it coming to an airfield near you eventually.

 

The downside of this is that other standards which we used to consider voluntary now matter. For example the Australian Standards, and we are now paying for the years when we left a few industry people to meet, discuss and implement impractical standards we can no longer ignore. As you would expect plaintiff lawyers have the biggest interest in these.

 

We also can't afford to ignore cutting edge technology which is moving very fast all over the world at the same time due to our digital age.

 

 

........$10,000 to send back to the family within ten minutes.

 

"FFS why would she do that FFS"said FFS Isaac.

 

"FFS don't you know?" asked Itzak "I was only telling Ezekial last FRiday not to touch them FFS! when..............."

 

Turbo doesn't know what this new acronym means, but it seems to attract responses, so he has used it.

 

 

I think that has been tried in the past, particularly with diagnostic software and I think trade practices legislation took care of it, but I'm not surprise people are becoming cynical.

 

 

...approach on of the Serbian babes when.....

 

 

I think he's an old friend of yours David.

 

 

..........hurt, especially when you're a rat.

 

People don't like us; they recoil from us; they kill us with sticks; they lay bait for us; they set traps for us - you'd think we were a bunch of CASA FoIs, and......

 

 

Dafydd, this is a link to a simple explanation of the Donoghue v Stevenson 1932 case, which shows how the Shirt case which Kaz quoted fits in.

 

http://lawgovpol.com/case-study-donoghue-v-stevenson-1932/

 

 

I'm going to a conference in Alice for 5 days then heading to the thermal springs of Mataranka before coming home through the Gulf.

Well worthwhile reading "We of the Never Never" before you go to Mataranka, then watching the film sitting in the movie set of the station homestead - an emotional experience - the characters on which it is based are buried in a cemetary a couple of kilometres away on Elsie Station, and that really ties the whole story together.

 

 

Why were the golfers hitting the trees?

You didn't notice the comma?

But I agree it was badly written.

 

 

I agree that the RAA has the power but does it have the expertise or the resources and will to gain the expertise?

I think the expertise is there, among the members, the resources are there, through volunteers the same as any other association, and the will I'll leave up to you.