turboplanner

Now a much better system would be similar to what the Australian Parachute Federation have in place, and have had in place for many years successfully. All drop zones have to have a drop zone safety officer. This is usually a high licensed experienced jumper and often an instructor. He /she has the authority and responsibility to, if an infringement is observed or reported, to speak to that person, endorse that persons logbook, or even ground that person for a period of time, if he/she feels the infringement is serious enough.This is positive action that gives results , not waffle and pipe dreams.

If you care to read some of the previous posts you'll realise a compliance and enforcement structure, which is currently missing from RAA operations will be needed for exactly the reasons you talk about. That's a necessary part of an SMS, along with the person at the top to drive it, and the job description of that person is laid down in the CASA document trail, which recent screamers on this site conveniently have decided not to study.

And all of that was required in 2010, it's not something new this week. We've screwed up big time for three years!

That's why I said an SMS was not a matter of just writing a manual to "identify" wallabys etc.

I missed this one earlier, confirms the health safety value of an airfield to a local community, as well as the surrounding towns where someone can be conveyed to the Cohuna airport from towns an hour or two away.

http://www.rich-phillips.com.au/news/default.asp?action=article&ID=878

Hazards at Stark field up here in North Queensland for instance would mean levelling of acres of nasty looking trees around the airport, plus the culling of hundreds of wallabys and roos that love to fed on lush green grass that only the runway offers. Then of course all the kite hawks and wedge tailed eagles would have to be shot out of the sky, don't want to hit one of those. And of course nearby Mt Elliot would need to be dynamited and levelled because it produces nasty turbulance on a windy day!.Where does this idealistic CASA initiated BS stop and start. Hazards are part of the game that we all willingly embrace, they've always been there , always will be. Putting together some SMS manual which "recognises "them won't change a thing. CASA cotton-wooling and waffle at it's finest !......................Maj...

The very last thing the Association needs this week is some Rambo venting about something he clearly doesn't understand on a public forum which a wounded CASA watches.

For their benefit, that's not the general attitude at all; many pilots are employees of medium to large companies which have had safety systems in place for years, and understand the principles of risk management.

For your information Major, this is not CASA initiated, it's lawsuit initiated, and CASA like any organization is just following due diligence.

If you think a safety management system is just a matter of writing a manual to "recognise" issues, you're sadly mistaken; an operation which just did that would be considered negligent.

In all companies which have gone through the change, there are always one or two who can't cope with the change and are forced out, but the majority survive and have a safer future.

A welcome boost to a Country airfield

http://www.premier.vic.gov.au/images/stories/documents/mediareleases/budget2011/130709_Rich-Phillips_-Regional_Aviation_Fund_grant_gives_Lethbridge_Airpark_upgrade_a_flying_start.pdf

"What is this meeting with CASA next Wednesday regarding" ??????? Now be honest.

"I'll HAVE to take him I supposed" as he took a close interest in how the miss spelt was geeting on with the pup tent.

Een....

......Sh$t Magnet.

Madge was quite upset by this. It had all started on Een's Recreational Frying when one of those ferals who hadn't stood for a board position had the temerity to offer an opinion contrary to Madge's beliefs. Madge had taken the feral to task, inferring he had the intelligence of a Block contestant, and the socially challenged gent had not only given him a "like" (meaning he had his hand on it), but had added a comment referring to Madge's sexuality, which got 17 agrees, 8 funnies (none with explanation), 2 informatives and a helpful carrot to stick.....

Madge had responded admirably to this with a patronising explanation of the structure of RAA (as it was in AUF days), and defended himself by saying he was a chick magnet (which we all know)

The socially challenged person (who was actually a senior director of CASA) made an unfortunate response to Madge referring to him as a Sh$t Magnet, and since Madge had misread the polarised RF community who idolised non-members of RAA, got 732 likes (all with notes to say they were"likes").

There was what appeared to be one dissenting post, but it was quickly realised due to the repeated phrases about how RAA needs "governance") that this one came from a serial thread watcher always on the lookout to remind us all that we don't know what we are doing.

Madge............

...hock.

"I'm not a filly, I've been around" said Madge who had turned from an outraged dissident who "might have to sort things out!" to the Reverend "nothing to see here, everythings OK" Mr Wonderful in 30 seconds. "I......."

".....I see, I see (and since the crowd were taking no notice of him) I $#@#* SEE!!", those who voted Aye, and got what they deserved and now Naying!"

"You could be right" said ..........

Panic move for the meeting?

Well in fact the Auster's so slow, you have it all in GA.

".....these have been hung for eight days!"

But......

It isn't going to happen soon, there's too much money to be made corrupting officials and it's so easy. I live in the middle of a patch in Melbourne and have had to deal with it for20 years. After living in another part of the suburb for years I had no idea of what was going on but very quickly learned the principle of developers actually employing staff to seek out an edge - a piece of land close to industrial or residential zoned land, which could be bought for about 10% of the cost of Residential/Industrial Zoned land by quietly working away to have the zoning changed. In many cases the developer signs a secret purchase agreement with the land holder to pay a small deposit and complete the deal subject to rezoning, so he doesn't even pay the pittance until after he collects. This is a form of insider trading which is a crime, and occasionally we score when someone opens his mouth once too often. Mostly though its a very hard slog watching the trends, watching innocent Council Announcements, the worst being along the lines of "Council has decided to protect xxxx by yyyy" and you usually find a clause buried somewhere ready to be used once the population has bought the dummy.

"......I'd have to fly a....." and that was all he got out before fifteen molotov cocktail throwing hamburger eating ferals raised their heads and started screaming "................."

The ones you want to avoid being involved with are those who die of negligence.

One downside of a settlement, in terms of safety information is that the terms are usually confidential, and there's no open admission or proof of guilt.

a little too much of the weeping widow stuff

This one is all about whether a manufacturer knew or ought to have known about a design in which people were dying in otherwise survivable crashes.

It is also about whether owners/operators knew or ought to have known the same.

What is interesting is that CASA have been dragged into it for not having applied a prescriptive decision; whether that has any bearing whatsoever on the cases will unfold in the success or failure of any claims.

Andy that's often routine in the corporate world and often it's the clock that spurs the decision and what has happened the last two times is an indication of commentators who lacked corporate experience more than anything else.

I've lived with last minititis all my career, on one occasion getting a $19 million tender in by 2 minutes. On another occasion an employee asked me on a Friday to remind him on the Monday that he had to sign and submit the application for the Permit for the next 12 months vehicle imports, worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Interesting since I think it was the same president who said that at no time was RAA not covered by insurance.

For you two who think it's funny, I don't see anything remotely funny in that

No, I walked away from that when Ed, who showed some positive intiative had the hatchet job done on him. The momentum among the board members currently doesn't even appear to be enough to elect a President let alone a full Executive, so it isn't worth wasting any more time on.

Turbo said...... the current trend is taking too many people.Mmmm maybe if we knew the cause of those accidents we could do something about it. Before you can solve a problem you have to identify the cause of the said problem.

Guess 9,200 members = $27.35 each per year

One way or the other, it's pretty disgraceful that the official figures are not available.

If you asked all 9200 members whether they wanted to continue spending the $25 to $50 per year or wanted to drop it, I suspect more people would respond than currently vote, particularly the ones who "only want to go flying"

However, if they don't object to it and don't vote, and those members who do vote are happy to spend that cost (which even at $50 is lower than many industry magazines), there's no real issue.

I'm just saying, get the real costs, keep an eye on the circulation, and also keep an eye on what's happening in the electronic world because that's where we are going.

We were told human factors was the answer to pilots making bad decisions resulting in accidents, I think that would be now be shown to be not the case. Now we have the SMS about to be imposed on us it and it remains to be seen what effect that will have but I think learning from accident reports would be far more beneficial that the HF and SMS put together.If the Police reports are no good for legal reasons why are they appropriate for the Coroner? Surely there is way we can have accident reports?

 

I can't help thinking if the same energy was put into getting accident reports as has been applied to Human Factors and now the SMS we would now have accident reports.

You may have been told that, but I remember it slightly differently - that in a large number of incidents, injury accidents and fatal accidents the primary cause was human factors (or putting it more realistically someone making a mistake) In other words they had been trained for a procedure, might have been successfully doing it for 2000 hours, but screwed up.

From this came a decision which gravitated to CASA and to RAA, that some focus on HF could prevent most of these.

At that point it turned into a ridiculous farce, with some industry booksellers concocting their version of training, and in general a quite irrelevent syllabus. I'm still to read about a pilot who grabbed a few crays thirty feet down, threw them in the Cessna and immediately climbed to 15,000 feet whereupon his eyeballs blew out.

Even if the cases where HF was a factor were written in simple language and posted on the ATSB website, and pilots were examined from material on that website would be better. You'd have to keep the exam in because as we know a percentage of GA and RA pilots have a healthy disregard for any safety training.

The SMS has been EXTREMELY badly explained in both GA and RA. I'm not sure of the statistics in GA, but if, as someone posted, there has been no reduction in injuries and fatalities, CASA needs to start again, and RAA needs to ensure that its system is not just a ritual "we've done it" series of books along the lines of what we've seen so far.

A safety management system is a complete culture of formalising what safe people are already doing. So it's targeted at the unsafe, sloppy, and detail challenged people who for example allow their aircraft to fall out of the sky when the engine stops instead of making a forced landing with perhaps a few broken bones. Reaching those people, in some cases removing them from the industry, and on other cases retraining requires a culture change in both the good and the bad. Right now for example, a lot of the safe pilots consider that the fatality issue is nothing to do with them, but the unsafe ones don't think they are unsafe and are not going to fix themselves.

Safety management is just that - managing for safety - so coming back to Safety Management Systems, you certainly will see some that haven't worked, and when you look at them you'll quickly see the people who built them didn't really know their business. However. other companies and organizations who have tuned in their management system to manage key safety points for their business or organization, WILL be able to show a big improvement, and that's what we need to be striving for because the current trend is taking too many people.

I for one don't have time to sit and read a magazine on-line. Isn't it the advertisements that cover the cost (or the greatest percentage of it) of the mag.Because of the 'sport pilot' mag. being passed around at work after I've finished it has caused a fair amount of interest among the crew, two of them have become members and gone on to achieve their pilot certificate. This would not have happened without the magazine being in print.

Just my opinion.

 

Cheers Davo.

Dazza also made a point about liking to read paper magazines, and proved his point by posting in the wrong thread, but we know what he means.

We are at the beginning of electronic media. the two main newspaper chains in Australia have made major changes to the numbers of staff and type of staff they employ, and are winding down print media fast and ramping up their electronic versions just as fast (I'm not impressed that they seem to think they can get the same subscription rates for electronic as they got employing hundreds of people and big print and distribution infrastructure.)

I like hunting each day while on camping trips, but these days either I can't do it in many areas, or need four licences up in the mountain wilderness - time moves on.

What you are thinking of is just an electronic version of the print magazine.

Instead, think of a structure where you click on and see the President talking to you about an issue. He explains that several options are available at varying costs and the screen goes to a full size spreadsheet with graph, and you can instantly see the result when he changes the input. He provides a series of bullet point screens, and wraps up the discussion by asking you to vote on the attached poll, or write some feedback on the issue. For the next couple of weeks you can see what others think and how they are voting. You click on another news item and see an actual video with the Technical Manager showing you how to identify and issue and how to fix it. You can also post comments on this news item of your own fixes.

You click on an advertisement, and there's a video of the aircraft for sale and a dozen colour photos.

Electronics are taking us to a new world of communication and you can already see this interaction I spoke of on the two Media Majors' websites.

David, the point I was making about the costs is we don't know; have a look at the Annual Report and you'll have no idea whether the price should go up or down, the ad prices should go up or down, or the whole thing should be dropped like a hot rock as a costly boat anchor.

Good point you made about other people reading the magazine and converting them to members - that's what magazines do, no disagreement from me there. However electronics do it even better. My wife has some road train videos on You Tube, and one which shows a road train de-coupling and splitting up into semis has had 26,000 views. All it really is is two operators walking around doing their days work.