Airservices will create a network of weather cameras across Australia following a suggestion and $160,000 donation from aviator and entrepreneur Dick Smith.
Speaking at the AOPA Australia Pacific Dialogue at Avalon last week, Airservices CEO Jason Harfield said he expected the network to be delivered by May this year.
"Dick Smith donated $160,000 to Airservices to introduce weather cams around the country similar to the NavCanada and FAA model," Harfield told the gathering of pilots and AOPA members.
"We're proud to announce that we're working through that, and later this month a survey will go out to show the number of sites we've got selected and then the industry [consulted] to ensure the sites implemented are the sites that you, as industry, would like."
The money is currently quarantined in a special bank account to make it easier to track the spending, rather than absorb it into general revenue where it would be more difficult to allocate to the weather cams accurately.
Harfield said the speed the project was progressing at was due to an existing system and changes within Airservices that he says have streamlined the process.
"We've been able to join up with the Bureau of Meteorology, who have got an extensive weather cam network already and we'll have this all installed and accessed by May. And so, for an organisation that's been known not to deliver on a promise and take forever and a day to deliver something, we're going from suggestion to implementation in the space of about six months.
"We thought that it was a really good suggestion," Harfield later told Australian Flying. "We went out and found that the bureau of met have got a network of cameras so we've been talking to them to get in, and with some of the capacity that Dick's provided we've said 'OK, we'll provide an additional X cameras as a result', and we're going out to industry to say 'this is where we've gotten to, have we got this right?' and are there any suggestions of where we put them in?"
Smith made the donation for the weather cams in December last year after selling his Citation jet in the USA and donating all the proceeds to charities and aviation foundations.