[Peetwo]

Hooded Canary not singing but still talking bollocks - 



Via the Yaffa:

ATSB wears Kickback over Angel Flight Report
15 August 2019
    
The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) has been roundly condemned by both Angel Flight and the Centre Alliance for its recommendations stemming from the Mount Gambier crash report released on Monday.

The report's recommendations into the VFR-into-IMC accident deliberately focused more on the systems and management behind Angel Flight than the actions of the pilot, suggesting that Angel Flight should consider using regular public transport rather than private pilots (PPL) because it was safer to do so.

Angel Flight CEO Marjorie Pagani slammed the report, saying that the ATSB focus was of no help to general aviation.

"The ATSB offered no safety recommendations to pilots flying light aircraft in bad weather," Pagani said in a statement. "It is regrettable that the Bureau made no relevant safety recommendations, nor gave any guidance whatsoever, to pilots flying in poor weather conditions – the cause of the accident.

"It would have been of benefit to the flying community had the ATSB focussed on these aspects of the accident.

"The safety recommendation made was for the charity to book people on airlines for travel. This does not adequately factor in cost (particularly where two or more people are traveling, which is often the case), nor does it properly factor in the infrequent scheduling or non-existence of airline flights into country regions across Australia, the inconvenience and difficulties faced by the elderly and families with young children at major city airports, and the associated ground travel; and appears to work on the assumption that city specialists and hospitals will gear their appointment times around airline timetables.

"Angel Flight does use airline flights where practicable and necessary, and will continue to utilise these services."

Centre Alliance's Senator Rex Patrick was openly critical in a statement released through Angel Flight. Senator Patrick has opposed the CASA-imposed restrictions on community service flights and was behind motions to disallow lodged in the previous parliament.

"The findings in respect of community service flights are intensely bureaucratic in nature and clearly written by people sitting at a desk in Canberra without reference to any of the thousands of families that have been helped by organisations such as Angel Flight," Senator Patrick said.

"Indeed, its hard to take the report’s analysis of Angel Flight seriously. It asserts that many flights can be replaced by commercial services almost blind to the costs of regional flights, their limited routes and their limited schedules. Indeed, the data the ATSB uses to support its claim are based on the very narrowest of data sets.

"The ATSB uses ‘lies, damned lies and statistics’, coupled with predominantly subjective analysis, to portray community service flights as unsafe. Angel Flights use experienced pilots and safe aircraft. There is no difference in the safety case associated with a CASA certified pilot flying a mate to the footy in Melbourne and a CASA certified pilot flying someone to chemo therapy in Melbourne, except the the ill patient is more aware of the qualifications of the pilots and the risks associated with a flight.

"Its Pel-Air (Norfolk Island ditching) all over again - for that particular report the ATSB were found to be grossly incompetent and were ultimately required to redo the report."

ATSB Chief Commissioner Greg Hood defended the investigation report, saying that investigators deliberately shied away from focusing on the pilot.

"If you have a look at the way the ATSB works, we've been broadly criticised, particularly over the Norfolk Island report where we focused on the individual, so with this investigation, given that it was the second triple-fatality, our methodology took us to having a look at organisational factors, and that's why we put in the recommendations we did," he told Australian Flying.

"We went to look at the organisational factors, and one of the problems we encountered is that we didn't have any data. There was no way to have a look at the safety of that particular sector of the industry because the data didn't exist.

"Being private flights they weren't required to state that they were Angel Flights, so what we had to do was ask AF for the schedules and then go back into the flight plan database and then the incident database and match that up to give us some idea of the health of the industry in relation to occurrences and accidents."

On the matter of the recommendation to place clients on RPT, Hood took pains to point out that the ATSB recommended only that Angel Flight consider using commerical flights in the same manner as the Canadian Hope Air, which places 70% of all clients with medical appointments on RPT.

Hood stated that the issue with using PPLs is that Angel Flight missions appeared to impart greater pressures to complete that flight than the ATSB believed are present during general private operations, leading to the conclusion that RPT would be a safer option.

"We did go to great lengths to be balanced," Hood said. "I know that's no everybody's view, but what we were faced with is two triple-fatalities and when we were able to extract the data it was telling us something very clearly in relation to these pressures and so then it was a matter of what recommendations do you make?

"The ATSB has no legislative powers to enforce any of these recommendations; they are there to improve the safety of the traveling public in these particular flights."

Angel Flight also took issue with the data analysis used in the reports, stating that the ATSB didn't use straight comparisons when assessing the levels of reported incidents and accidents.

"The ATSB also chose to compare only the passenger-carrying sectors of flights coordinated by the charity – it disregarded the flights, also coordinated by the charity, where the aircraft flew from home base to the city collection points, the return trips back to base, and the positioning flights to collect passengers from their own home towns," Pagani said

"It did, however, include those flights when reporting ‘occurrences’ against the charity flights. There was, and is, no reason for this failure. To remove up to two-thirds of the coordinated flights in order to make statistical conclusions is unjustifiable. Moreover, when comparing the data with private flights generally, it did not exclude the non-passenger flights for that group – all flights were counted in the general private sector, but not in the charity sector."

Angel Flight is currently contesting the data used by CASA to justify applying restrictions to Angel Flight operations last March, with the matter scheduled to be back before the courts again in September. According to Greg Hood, the ATSB did not rely on the CASA data, but used its own analysis to arrive at a similar conclusion, that Angel Flights were statistically more dangerous than normal private operations.

"We've done everything entirely separately from the regulator," Hood pointed out. "We've been very careful in that space especially after the experience we had with Norfolk [Island] and previous investigations, so we obtained the data from Angel Flight [and] we did our own analysis completely independent from anything that was done by the regulator.

"I'm absolutely confident in the science applied to this. We have a number of data scientists here with PhDs and we had one team developing the science and arriving at conclusions and another team making sure that that was valid.

"The ATSB just wants [Angel Flight] to operate well and for the people who are being carried to medical appointments to have that level of assurance that they're going to get there safely."

Read more at http://www.australianflying.com.au/lates...MDIj7qM.99

& via the Oz:

ATSB’s warning to pilots on risky flights: ‘Don’t push it, don’t go’



A new safety campaign urging ­pilots “don’t push it, don’t go” will be launched next week by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau following this week’s Angel Flight crash report.

That report found pilot Grant Gilbert should never have taken off from Mount Gambier on June 28, 2017, due to low-lying cloud and the fact he was only visually flight-rated. His TB-10 Tobago was airborne for just 70 seconds before the crash that killed him and his passengers, Tracy Redding and daughter Emily.

It was the second fatal Angel Flight crash in six years, with the previous triple-fatality accident in 2011 occurring in similar circumstances.

ATSB chief commissioner Greg Hood said the bureau’s finding that Angel Flight services were seven times more likely to result in a fatality than other private flights showed more needed to be done to improve safety.

“We have absolutely no barrow to push; we’re not anti-Angel Flight, we’re simply saying that the data is telling us something,” Mr Hood told The Australian.

“We’ve got two triple fatalities, you’ve got next of kin who are incredibly upset and we think that better things can be done in the sector.”

He admitted to being “taken aback” by the response from Angel Flight CEO Marjorie Pagani that the final report provided little in the way of useful guidance. She criticised the recommendation that Angel Flight consider booking commercial flights where available as an alternative to using volunteer private pilots, and said there was no advice given to pilots flying in poor weather.

Mr Hood said the best guidance the ATSB could provide was the message of their “don’t push it, don’t go” campaign.

“If the weather’s not suitable, you shouldn’t be flying,” he said.

“I don’t know how many times we’ve run these campaigns over the years, but pilots who are only rated to fly under visual conditions have continued to get themselves in trouble.”

The Australian understands as many as 100 incidents of pilots becoming spatially disoriented in cloud have been reported to the ATSB in the past decade, resulting in 21 fatalities.

Crossbench senator Rex Patrick said he would continue to push for new regulations imposed on Angel Flight by the Civil Aviation Safety Authority to be reversed, despite the finding that the community service operation had a higher fatality risk than other private flights.

“Angel Flight uses experienced pilots and safe aircraft,” Senator Patrick said. “There is no difference in the safety case associated with a CASA-certified pilot flying a mate to the footy in Melbourne and a CASA-certified pilot flying someone to chemotherapy in Melbourne except the ill patient is more aware of the qualifications of the pilot and the risks associated with a flight.”

But the ATSB argued that transporting patients to medical appointments carried greater responsibility and pressure, which had led to pilots taking off in unsuitable conditions.

Transport safety director Stuart Godley said it was important that pilots were trained how to recognise those pressures and deal with them, “rather than leave them alone to make those decisions in the heat of the moment”.

And in regard to O&O'ing reports...  

ATSB chief Greg Hood: More complex reports take time



Australian Transport Safety Bureau chief commissioner Greg Hood has defended the increasing time frame for aircraft incident investigations, pointing out the greater depth of recent final reports.

This week’s report on the 2017 Angel Flight crash at Mount Gambier went to great lengths to delve into organisational factors that may have contributed to the accident, and produce the statistics highlighting the risks involved with the not-for-profit operator.

Mr Hood said much of the data had to be sourced from scratch, after the ATSB discovered that what it needed for an examination of the safety of the community service flight sector did not exist.

“What we did is we went back and got more than a decade of schedules from Angel Flight and we matched those flights with data from the Bureau of Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Economics and also from the ATSB database,” he said. “(Statistician) David Wilson wrote the program that matched all that up and for the first time we were able to compare flights in the community service flight sector with private, charter and regular public transport.”

A number of investigations were close to being finalised including the 2017 Sydney Seaplanes crash and the Australia Day crash of a Grumman G-73 Mallard in Perth the same year.

 
Hmm...in the real world the Hooded Canary protestations would be all well and good, however the problem for Herr Hood is that he has a massive  credibility issue in all this because of his checkered past inside of both CASA and ASA. To say the guy is impartial and a SME (subject matter expert) would welcome hilarity from the more credentialed aviation accident investigation professionals throughout the world. 

Remember that this was the guy that as Chief Commissioner saw fit to threaten internally his employees with the possibility of jail time if they were contemplating leaking or having an opinion on the active (at the time) MH370 investigation and search - References:

Joining dots on Hood threat & obfuscation of MH370

..As witnessed above, currently there is much finger pointing, hand wringing, consternation and condemnation; on the ATSB's 'Hooded' threat to it's employees and attempted obfuscation of the Australian's FOI request for the recorded opinions of the various MH370 SSWG participants...

Well aided and nicely abetted.

..If the data Australia refuses to release belongs to Malaysia; then why does Hood simply just say so. “Sorry folks, if it were our data, we would release it without hesitation; but, it ain’t”. “If you want it, petition the Malaysian government, it all belongs to them”.  But Hood does not say this – clearly, that’s not case. So, like Higgins and Byron,  I’m left wondering just who is running this country? ..

And remember that this was the guy that was so severely intertwined within the PelAir cover-up (Mark I & II) to suggest a massive conflict of interest with any dealings with the ATSB, let alone being the Chief Commissioner...

References: 1. https://auntypru.com/forum/showthread.ph...38#pid8238 & 2. https://auntypru.com/forum/showthread.ph...29#pid8029

The Iron Ring & the Hooded canary -   

Quote from this week's SBG: Speak softly; yonder, as I think, he walks.

 "...The opening gambit is readily seen in the media – see: there’s Hood, doing a Geoffrey Thomas (he of Sunrise fame). This is not a top quality act, but ‘twill suffice. Firstly, we must examine the ‘props’ used, the title for a start will impress – ‘top dog in the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) and a natural performer. Always seen looking ‘windswept’ and interesting, dressed in his canary yellow vest, wearing his ‘courage’ wrist band. The ‘shrinks’ would have a field day with that little lot, no matter. The long suffering public will not know the lack of qualification, or the association with some of the most disgusting ‘Acts of bastardy’ which hover about the ‘windswept’ visage. They will have no concept of conflicted interest or even ‘departmental’  manipulations. No; they just see the ‘fluff’ and hear the soothing words, reassured; they happily hop on the cheapest flight and toddle off to booze in Bali..."

 &.. from SBG post #95:

"...The main reason being that while HVH was the CASA Executive Officer ultimately overseeing the enforcement actions against both PelAir and Dominic James I also have, on good authority, information that HVH was the designated co-ordinator/liaison officer dealing with the FAA audit team and therefore the consequential cover-up of the actual FAA findings that could have led to the possible Cat II IASA rating..." 

So with interest piqued the BRB have tasked me to re-examine the HVH crumb trail with the intent to join some further chronological dots & dashes on the PelAir cover-up timeline (i.e Pel-Air: A coverup: a litany of lies?)... 

  
MTF...P2