– Steve Hitchen
For the second week in a row, I find myself wanting to comment on an accident, even though it's something I say I rarely do. This week we have the report into a fatal EC135 crash that the ATSB has concluded was caused by VFR flight into IMC. The really sad part is that the pilot knew he was in strife and landed at a safe haven, but then after 40 minutes decided to give it another go. We don't know what he was thinking, but enough of us have been in this situation before. Forced down at an airport, we watch the sky eagerly to see when it will relent and allow us to get going. All of a sudden we start to see light patches in the grey overcast. Surely that means things are getting better? Eventually we convince ourselves that the weather has improved enough for us to give it a go. Misguided optimism comes to the fore and we leave our safe haven, just like this pilot did. It's not easy to gauge from the ground if the overcast is really breaking up, so we need to be aware of the danger of misguided optimism and take that into account when we make the call to go.
The new Multicom proposal CASA published today contains a level of commonsense that is, I believe, unprecedented. Allowing 126.7 as the frequency at uncharted airports remains the simplest solution and, as the paper notes, many risk mitigators are already in place. This solution seems so obvious it makes me wonder how the Frankenstein proposal of December last year was ever brought to life. Aviation is already a complex activity and excess complication should be weeded out of aviation, not added to it. I feel the CASA hierarchy was subject to what's known as the Dopeler Effect. This is the tendency for silly ideas to seem reasonable if they come at you fast enough. A bit more thinking time and consideration of what the risks really are has produced the simplest answer. I hope CASA has learned that effective regulation doesn't necessarily equate to complex regulation. A couple of weeks back I offered CASA a glass of champagne for killing off the Frankenstein in the room; this week they can have a strawberry in it!
Dick Smith got a very respectable turn-out for his seminar in Wagga Wagga yesterday. They were there to here Dick's ideas for revolutionising general aviation. This could all have been said from Canberra, but doing it in Wagga Wagga had the impact of airing the ideas in the heart of the Minister for Infrastructure and Transport's own electorate. Naturally, with Dick being a high-profile person, it got a lot of local media attention. The keystone of Dick's plan is for the minister to implement an agreement Dick says was struck with previous minister Barnaby Joyce and the Labor Party's Anthony Albanese to change the Civil Aviation Act to remove safety as an over-riding priority. Although the minister has not yet openly rejected the idea, deliberately delaying any response under the cover of "considering" is having the same effect. The question remains why the minister hasn't confirmed the agreement. It could be that he doesn't agree with it, sees it not as a priority and will eventually get around to it, or that there is some dark and nefarious political motive behind it all. When politicians are involved, always suspect politics. If Dick's seminar yesterday has put some mustard on the minister, it can only be good for aviation.
Australia Warbirds Association Limited (AWAL) is getting nervous about the future of the CASA funding. The regulator gives money to the various approved self-administering aviation organisations (ASAO) like AWAL, RAAus, GFA and so forth to do the administering work that otherwise CASA would need to do. Now CASA is saying they are reviewing the funding arrangements, but that there will be no change in total overall funds for the ASAOs. So what's there to review? It can only be that CASA is looking to cut the pie into different pieces in the future, which inevitably means that some ASAOs will get more and others less. With AWAL being probably one of the smaller ASAOs around, their share will be relatively parsimonious as it is, so they have some foundation for worry if their slice was to get smaller. So, if the funding level is not going to change, what has prompted the need for a review? If more and more people are migrating from CASA admin to ASAO admin, then the ASAOs need more funding! The only way flat funding will work is if some ASAO participation is up and others down. I don't think we're seeing fluctuation of such a level that the wealth has to be re-distributed.
The rift is getting wider. At the last TAAAF meeting, the forum elected to basically kick out AOPA. The group was getting concerned over the reasons why AOPA co-founded the Australian General Aviation Alliance (AGAA), and when AOPA didn't supply answers, felt they had to take action. AOPA has said they had no intention of leaving TAAAF, but surely their position was no longer tenable. AOPA CEO Ben Morgan has since said TAAAF was no longer working the way they needed it to, so we could expect they would have left the forum sooner or later anyway. The question for the immediate future is whether or not other TAAAF member organisations feel the same way. Morgan has dropped hints that there may be more defectors. but if there are, those groups are making no noise about it. It would make no sense for an association to be a member of both TAAAF and AGAA, so it follows that what's good for one is bad for the other. What we can't tell right now is whether or not this rift is good for aviation or bad for aviation.
Go Matt Hall! A great win in Cannes that promises so much for his 2018 Red Bull Air Race campaign. Second in the championship after two rounds is a handy place to be in, and with the Edge 540 nicely tuned, Matty and his team can rightly expect some more brilliant performances. Currently the fox is the USA's Mike Goulian, but Hall is heading a pack of hounds that inlcudes Yoshi Muroya, Matthias Dolderer and Martin Sonka. For sure it's going to be a challenging year, but Matt Hall Racing has never been too shy to pick up gauntlets when ever they are thrown down.
May your gauges always be in the green,
Hitch