turboplanner

We had a long thread on this, and I did the research then went to CASA and we established that the legal requirement was to land on the into wind or duty runway - for everyone.

That was about three years ago, and CASA had already identified the "after you", no "after you", or straight bullying as a safety issue and I think had ordered retraining for at least 1 RPT.

The question came up a few months ago and I looked for the CAR and found something different which almost looked as if the airlines had leaned on CASA to get priority.

So is this ever blows up, which appears inevitable in the long term, the legal trail could make front page headlines.

There are lots of valuable contributions in this thread.The main problem is the enormous get-there-itis urge: How do you counsel normally wise and prudent people that to give place to this urge may result in loss of limb, aircraft or life? Once the preventative (innoculation) is applied to the get-there-itis disease, lives will be saved, planes will be kept intact and insurance premiums will go down.

Bandit, the advantage we have is that we know the cultures so to speak and although, disgracefully, 95% of the information we get is unofficial, we communicate enough to get to the bottom of most crashes. For example we know we've had a series of unnecessary stall/spins so if we wanted to we could reduce that statistic rapidly. Your analysis also gives us direction as well. So the question really is why the RAA inertia?

Well there were some very good shearers. Three of them pretended to castrate me when I was ten, but O only wish I had a tape recorder for those stories the characters could tell.

Was that a star thistle from some ewes?

I was lucky enough to have been influenced by Macarthur Job and the old Aviation Safety Digest where no punches were pulled, and the stories were all lessons,

so the first time I got into this situation I was mentally prepared.

Due to depart on a Sunday to get to work Monday, I told my passenger about the weather forecast, that we may not be back for work, why, and that the decision would be go or no go.

When is was no go on Sunday I alerted the Flying Club, my employer, and gave him the safety explanation, and so on for a couple of days.

We got back in safe conditions.

The reasons I could do this - because I'm a Type A personality and by natural instincts would have tried to force my way through on the Sunday were:

1. I had been very well alerted to the fatal downside by the Aviation Safety Digest (The instructors had just said "Never fly into cloud)

2. Having been conditioned for this, and knowing I was making the correct decision, I had sufficient authority (courage) to be firm with my passenger and employer (the Club had said, even though I knew it was costing them training money, to take as long as I needed.

So I think you can condition yourself very well psychologically to recognise the situation, and err on the safe side. I've even heard pilots say they only ever fly on clear days, and I've never heard anyone criticise them.

You might be saying now "Yeah Right, what about when you have two or three bullies in with you, maybe one or two who are pilots, and they are yelling 'Go, go, you'll be right etc'"

I agree that's very hard to overcome, and maybe that's where some techniques and training are required.

If you knew some of the shearers I've known Jab, you'd understand the feelings of the journalist.

...le whereupon she gave a mighty scream and a great heave... and he was hirsuit.

And this was why he lisped, he'd tried pliers, wire strainers, and even a string attached to a door knob, but he just couldn't get it......

Flying is a safe as you make it, in the end it is your desicions while flying which will determine your outcome at the end of the day.Alf

The statistics do indeed show that flying is safer than driving a car but those statistics don't drill down to the "cluster" situations we find ourself in, where a culture which may have deteriorated over decades eventually exposes its members to greater levels of risks. You will see that in other forms of sport as well as flying.

I maintain that for voluntary/recreational activity it is not acceptable to have either deaths or injury, and while you may not achieve that perfect record, if you are aiming for it and focusing on it the figures remain low.

I've kept citing speedway safety in Victoria involving about 1500 drivers in what is a dangerous sport, and where there hasn't been a driver fatality in about 47 years - zero. That is not the same in other clusters in other States, and no doubt involves some luck, but it shows it can be achieved.

A good rule of thumb is if you know the person who has died you need to start helping others to readdress safety, whether it be construction, behaviour, training, administration, environment, checklists and so one.

CFI's, Instructors, and Clubs can always make a difference, if they want to, and so can the participants, although some of them need to be led, shown and assessed for understanding, or booted out, a good example being some individual posting about a happy day spent ignoring basic safe procedure, while the body of a pilot lay in a morgue most probably due to doing the exact same thing.

When clusters start to grow and join into regular statistics, in GA the pressure comes on CASA, DIT structure, and the Minister. In RA, self regulation, the pressure comes on the body which is supposed to be doing what I've outlined above, and when that isn't happening then things begin to change and never in the direction the participants (in this case flyers) want because the people making the changes (CASA, DIT, Minister) are in self preservation mode and the participants are expendable.

This particularly applies to non-essential activities and there are quite a few sports which no longer exist for safety, or other community pressure reasons.

So the question posed on this thread, is a timely one.

The four CASA audits are probably the starting point; if you go back to the time of the Sting crash, that one is just grinding its way through the courts now, with some embarrassing fallout which will affect us.

All the stall/spin crashes are yet to go through the system, and some of them could produce multi million dollar payouts; all the crashes will leave criticism of someone somewhere.

So now is the time to walk away from the people who say shit happens, now is the time to start methodically bullet proofing construction, procedures, training, responsibilities and all the complex things that can reduce these losses to zero.

........the upper bunk and landed right on her high gloss...............

Interesting just how selective people's minds can be:

In Victoria, we have managed to get motor vehicle fatalities down from just under 1100 per year to flatten at around 300 per year.

Every one of them gets Television coverage and newspaper coverage at about the same level as private aircraft fatalities.

Often that coverage extends to background TV and newspaper stories on the effect of the accident on families and friends, and the local comunity

Sometimes documentaries are made about the accident.

You probably just aren't noticing it

I think we've had four unusually bad starts, and it's looking like normal is now.

Is it a UAV or UAV facsimile?

It certainly sounds like someone has put video and GPS in so they can see where they are going.

It could be a Police UAV checking out the grass crops

Sounds like one wasn't on the duty runway.......

Just a bit of confusion, that's all.

Normal incident contacts I would think; this was an incident.

True Nev, but JMac's first official introduction to RA culture was probably enough for a lifetime.

I went searching and am happy for anyone to correct me if I'm wrong, but I couldn't find an AD which related to the Robinson SB mentioned above. This means that the 30th April date set by Robinson is meaningless as owner/operators are under not complusion to carry out SB's unless mandated by an AD.How the regulator (either the FAA or CASA) could ignore this safety issue is beyond me, based on lives lost even prior to last week at Bulli. I totally agree with calls to ground this aircraft until the mods are done. The general public are relying on the regulator to address real safety issues and I agree with Motz that this one is about clear cut as any safety issue in aircraft design. The ATSB has already provided an alert to this deisgn flaw after the last R44 crash. Why did CASA not act to potentially save these 4 lives?

news reporting it was an RV-12 on its maiden flight

....well it has exposed a massive lack of understanding so that's a good thing.

The scary part is that lack of understanding is quoted by people who in most cases are supposed to have received training, guidance and assessment by qualified Instructors.

Yes and I think the victims relatives would have an Incredibly strong case against casa AND Robinson.

This one looks like it will also be a criminal case as well since the aircraft wasn't grounded.

This one will come down to whether CASA followed procedure Motz, but I agree with you Motz, and this one may also bite those in the CASA chain of responsibility because of their meddling in our lives when they feel like it. However it will probably be at least five years before the Court action starts, and they may not even exist by then.

Oh, you are a hand full at times Tomo.

ben, forum discussions are quite erratic and not a means to analyse and determine the cause of an accident. In this case it looks like ATSB will be investigating, so there will be an interim report in a few months and a final report down the track.

In the case of RA accidents we've only ever seen a couple of ATSB reports.

In the absence of these reports, discussion is the next best thing;the value is in the spinoff discussions, where there's no reason not to follow a thread in great detail if it is teaching us how to safeguard ourselves in the future against issues which may have played no part at all in the crash we were originally discussing. I agree that the one you are talking about has several twists involving people other than the pilot.

I suppose we are trained at the base level as recreational or occasional flyers.

For what you just referred to relating to 60 deg. there are calculations - charts of them giving the various combinations.

So if you were going on to an environment where there would be a copilot and time, then that knowledge could come in handy at some time in the future.

I notice you didn't quote the speed, and that's that's achilles heel of getting too complicated too soon in a profession. At our level as non professionals we never achieve the recency levels to remember all those minute details or put them into use. The problem comes when someone is in an emergency, and pulls the angle on, forgetting the essential proviso and dumps a perfectly good aircraft nose first into the ground when he may have survives with a few dents.