– Steve Hitchen
Aviation safety education measures have become collateral damage of the aviation community's general disengagement from CASA over regulatory and punitive misdemeanours. That means resources such as Out-n-Back have been somewhat under-utilised. Pip Spence partly acknowledged that at Safeskies when she said that research showed a lack of awareness of safety tools. For too many GA pilots, contact with the education side of CASA is poisoned by memories of dealing with the regulatory side, so the strategy used is to completely avoid anything with a CASA logo on it. The outcome of all of that has probably been a net decrease in safety. CASA's new safety campaign may find itself another victim of the resistance, but those that venture forward will find some very good material on how to fly safely, and not all of it relates back to rules and regulations. Aviation safety often is a result not from strict adherence to rules, but rather from the actions a pilot takes in the grey zones where the rules are silent. This campaign covers those areas as well, and it's worth going into even if your previous experiences with the regulator may have been distasteful.
The general momentum towards self-declared medicals is now so irresistable that it will take an immovable force to stop it. This week the Technical Working Group (TWG) report effectively endorsed the idea to the Aviation Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP), which will now consider its advice to CASA management. That advice is likely to be passed on accompanied by a large green tick. But, CASA has in the past shown that it does indeed have immovable forces within. Data on medical incapacitation in flight shows the risk is almost non-existent, and the RAAus experience over many years proves that point further. Self-declared medicals for PPLs are way overdue and the GA community is starting to get impatient. However, CASA is a bureaucracy, and one guarantee you get with bureaucracies is that they will always do things the longest, most drawn-out way possible. They go through processes; box-ticking, analysis, application of logic and reasoning. In the end, you get something. However, it is a known fact that you can use perfect logic and reasoning to arrive at the wrong answer, often the result of the process being injected with a large syringe full of bias and self-interest. Working for us this time is that CASA has the necessary anti-bodies to the contents of the syringe: a cadre of senior managers that believe in the self-declared medical and have the power themselves to shift the immovable forces out of the way and let the momentum roll through to legislation.
Do you get the feeling we have to throw some old Cessna 150s into a volcano somewhere to appease the aviation gods? If it hasn't been COVID getting in the way of things it has been some very temperamental weather. This week, Warbirds Downunder was canceled because Temora has had more rain than a picnic in a waterfall. The show, one of Australia's premier warbird displays, was last held in 2018. The 2020 version was postponed to 2021 thanks to COVID, then put-off again to 2022 because nothing had improved in those 12 months. And now, only weeks away from the gates opening, Temora Aviation Museum has had to pull the pin again because the ground is waterlogged. In Temora. The place averages 541 mm of rain per year. This year the total has already passed 746 mm and there's more to come. And you can add to the deluge the tears of the organising team that has taken a hard decision late in the process that wipes out at least 12 months worth of work. Someone who can relate too well to that is Mark Bright at Wings over Illawarra. He has had the worst luck of any air show organiser in this country when to comes to weather. In his favour, WOI is largely held on hard-stand except for the camping ground/GA park, but even then, waterlogging has caused WOI to be postponed before (2015). We can but cross our fingers and hope that the rain doesn't deal a cruel hand to WOI again. And maybe chuck some old airframes in volcanos.
May your gauges always be in the green,
Hitch