– Steve Hitchen
Like a thespian afraid to say the name "Macbeth" in a theatre, I too am finding myself reluctant to utter the name of an upcoming air show should it too be cursed with cancelation. After the Jamestown Air Spectacular and Warbirds Downunder were both canceled because of inclement weather, the aviation community is wondering what it has to do to get an air show up and running. First COVID, now the rain. But an air show is a hundred things all coming together in one place, and each one of those things has the potential to go awry, resulting in the show organisers having to call the whole thing off. As a rule, it is never the things you can control that are the show-stoppers, it's the ones you just have to trust in that generally break the deal. Trust in weather is perhaps the biggest, and the one that show organisers fear the most. That's right, they're more afraid of inclement weather than they are of CASA not issuing the approval. Speaking broadly, every year there will be one or two air shows that downpours kill, but not usually the majority of them! With that in mind, we find ourselves on tenterhooks looking forward to that air show in November, because it is our last chance for the year to party on this scale.
The Soar Aviation/Box Hill Institute saga has been a sad and sorry affair, one that hopefully this class action settlement will finally put to rest. It has meant a lot of pain for a lot of people and if the system was working properly, shouldn't have happened in the first place. Although some hailed that business model as "innovative" and "game-changing", many people in the flight training industry just couldn't see how it was going to work. Were students trained on Bristells, Tecnams and Foxbats really going to be attractive propositions to upstream employers? None of those types are being used on charters or air transport work much around Australia; they weren't designed for that anyway. And employers are not mugs: they have registers where they enter the names of flying schools in either black or red ink. When a CV crosses their desks, one of the first things they ask is "who trained this person?" If the poor soul came from a school etched with red ink, then their chances of getting a job reduced to almost zero. A canny CPL candidate should ask around first to find out which schools are on the good side of the ledger and spend their time, effort and money there. There's nothing new in this; advice to choose your flying school well has been around for decades and it has the same amount of validity today as it did when the Wright Flyer was still a bicycle. The Soar model seemed innovative, but probably too good to be true, and you know what they say about that.
CASA this week released a re-vamped version of their Out-n-Back video series. If you've never seen this before, it's a number of videos that follow a flight through the outback detailing all the smart things needed to head out over the Never Never and get back safely. The new series has been re-edited into shorter 3-4 minute sections rather than the 10-minute+ episodes of the original. This makes specific material easier to find rather than having to wade through a lot of other stuff to find what is critical to you. Featuring 2021 CASA Wings Awards FTO of the Year Ward Air, this series contains all the good advice that you just won't find in CASA's nav training syllabus. If you're thinking about heading out there for the first time soon, you'd do well to give this a look over first.
And speaking of the CASA Wings Awards, nominations for the 2022 awards close on Wednesday, which means you have five days left to get your submission sorted out and lodged through the online nomination system. One last check before you push the button is always a good idea. Read the criteria; read your submission. Then ask yourself how well you have matched the two. One characteristic common to most of the winners over the years has been the quality of the nomination and much as the quality of the person nominated.
May your gauges always be in the green,
Hitch