– Steve Hitchen
CASA OAR completed the review of the airspace around Avalon in February 2020. Now, 30 months later they have started consulting on a proposal to remove the Class E overlying the airport and extend the Class D all the way up to the base of the Melbourne control step. That means, under current arrangements, RAAus pilots won't be able to overfly Avalon as they have no access to CTA. RAAus is very confident that will be rectified in the future, but for now, their members will have to divert around the Class D roadblock. The issue I have will all of this is the disconnect that occured between the review and this week's proposal. The review was written pre-COVID when Avalon was a busy secondary airport for Melbourne. Since that time, Air Asia has gone to MEL and VietJet didn't end up coming at all. Jetstar has cut back flights and movements have halved. The Avalon that was reviewed in 2020 is not the Avalon we have today, although start-up Bonza is expected to take-up some capacity when it starts later this year. My feedback to OAR is that for the time being, the best strategy is to do nothing. Shelve the project and watch to see what the Avalon of the future will be. Right now, OAR is operating on data that has been invalidated by time and circumstance, and it's hard to make a good decision when so much has changed.
General aviation's leaders have been known on occasion to differ in their opinions on things. Many occasions, to be truthful. But in Canberra last Tuesday, it seems they found reason to agree on something: the performance of Catherine King. The new minister put out the call to parley at a round-table meeting on the jobs and skills shortage that is proving an existential crisis for aviation, and those that answered the call came away impressed with King's level of engagement and interest. King gave the impression that she was genuinely interested in the state of affairs in GA and actively encouraged the group to put forward their ideas for solutions. This, of course, created a modicum of friction given that one sector's solution had the potential to be another sector's burden. Anecdotal evidence suggests that King handled things fairly and without any obvious bias. That's a good sign for general aviation, because what the industry needs right now is for positive action rather than political appeasement. The members of the round table all agreed on one other point: the stockpile of expertise in engineering and flight crew training has reached a nadir, and it will take much more than ineffective measures and motherhood statements to recover the situation. If King was engaged and interested as people believe, there is no way she could have left the room under any other impression than that the industry was desperate to turn things around. Only what she elects to do next can tell us if the optimism she generated in Canberra last Tuesday is justified.
In some good new, CASA has confirmed that they are working with East Gippsland Shire Council to get the RNAV back for Mallacoota Airport. The instrument approach was deleted after the council elected not to go ahead with certification because they felt it was not practical. With the loss of certification came the loss of the RNAV. CASA's team were intially bewildered with the council decision not to seek certification, as they believed the problems were not insurmountable. Yesterday the regulator said they expected that Mallacoota would regain its certification by 6 October and had re-checked the RNAV. Whilst good news, I believe a better solution would have been to let the RNAV stand even though the airport wasn't certified. CASA likes to point out that there is no jurisdiction in the world that permits instrument approaches at non-certified airports and that Australia was not going to be the first. That sort of ignores the fact that prior to CASR Part 139 coming into force, RNAVs were successfully operating at non-certified airports around Australia. So whilst the Mallacoota situation is good for aviation in general, the wrong method was used to arrive at the right answer.
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May your gauges always be in the green,
Hitch