The Last Minute Hitch: 11 April 2025
11 April 2025
– Steve Hitchen
ATSB investigators must have been startled by the number of holes found in their Sea World Swiss cheese. In all, they encountered 28 issues that banded together to cause two helicopters to collide there two years ago. It is alarming, really, that a professional organisation can implement so many layers of safety and still have something this traumatic happen. What does that mean for those of us that operate with fewer layers of safety; PPLs and RPCs? What I learned from this accident more than anything is that safety, no matter how hard we try, is never guaranteed to anyone, no matter how skilled or experienced you are. Believing anything else is actually dangerous. Although we operate in less complex environments than air operators, we do so with safeguards in place no more steadfast than our own situational awareness, which comprises procedures and alerted see-and-avoid. Once we let either of these degrade, we are treading closer to the line of disaster than we should be. ATSB investigations exist so we can learn from them, and ignoring the lessons from this collision is a safety issue in itself.
"..Lightning Woman should have plenty of suitors.."
Dick Smith has always been a great advocate for GA adventure, having made one or two expeditions himself over the years and assisted in many more. It's therefore a natural move for him to stump up an exquisite trophy for the first person to fly an electric plane from the UK to Darwin. That will be a gargantuan task with the current technology, and one that will probably take longer than the 27 days Keith and Ross Smith completed the journey in back in 1919. That's with current technology. Future technology is likely to see hydrogen-electric aircraft achieving earth-rounding endurance long before battery powertrains get there, which places companies like Stralis Aircraft in the box seat to claim Dick's Lightning Woman. Stralis is due for their first flight by the end of this year, producing a viable powertrain in the second half of next year. With that in their back pocket, I can imagine them shipping an A36-HE to the UK and flying it home. Is there a better way to demonstrate the capability of your system than stretching its legs across the world? With companies like Dovetail Electric Aircraft and ZeroAvia also making huge leaps in development, Lightning Woman should have plenty of suitors. However, flying that route in a fossil-fueled GA aeroplane is arduous enough due to the unreliability of avgas in non-GA countries. How are they going to go with hydrogen? But that's just one of many obstacles that innovative developers will overcome with time. And until they do, Lightning Woman will have to be a lady in waiting.
Acrobat has finished searching the document. No matches were found. That's the response I got when I tried to find the word "aviation" in the Liberal Party's policy document. The word is literally not in there. Given that the regions are shaping up as key battlegrounds, the National Party is in the Coalition as well and the ALP has shown they're prepared to support regional connections by buying REX if needed, you would think the Coalition would make their weapons known to the world. The section on regions doesn't mention REX or any other regional service, almost like Peter Dutton has decided it's a fight they can't win, so they won't pick it. I will concede there may be some policy yet to find its way to the surface, and the office of Shadow Minister Bridget McKenzie has been asked if that is the case. Both the Coalition and the ALP are expected to launch their campaigns this Sunday, so there may be something forthcoming after that. The ALP has taken a stance that the White Paper will do, which has been backed by drip-fed announcements of regional airport funding. Strangely, the minister has been missing from the aviation community, with many asking, for example, why she was not at Avalon. There is a difference between being transparent and being invisible, and whilst the former is desirable the latter is accepted as an indication of indifference. Indifference is not a characteristic you want to be tagged with going into a very tight election that is beginning to smell like a hung parliament.
Next week, you won't be getting the Australian Flying eNews on Friday, you'll get it on Wednesday! That's all about Easter and people hitting the road early. And the week after that will also not be on Friday 25 April (ANZAC Day), but rather delayed until Monday 28 April. For those that regularly rely on this column to tell them it's Friday, we do apologise. You'll have to find something else to tell you the weekend is here. We should resume our Friday cadence after that.
May your gauges always be in the green,
Hitch
11 April 2025
– Steve Hitchen
ATSB investigators must have been startled by the number of holes found in their Sea World Swiss cheese. In all, they encountered 28 issues that banded together to cause two helicopters to collide there two years ago. It is alarming, really, that a professional organisation can implement so many layers of safety and still have something this traumatic happen. What does that mean for those of us that operate with fewer layers of safety; PPLs and RPCs? What I learned from this accident more than anything is that safety, no matter how hard we try, is never guaranteed to anyone, no matter how skilled or experienced you are. Believing anything else is actually dangerous. Although we operate in less complex environments than air operators, we do so with safeguards in place no more steadfast than our own situational awareness, which comprises procedures and alerted see-and-avoid. Once we let either of these degrade, we are treading closer to the line of disaster than we should be. ATSB investigations exist so we can learn from them, and ignoring the lessons from this collision is a safety issue in itself.
"..Lightning Woman should have plenty of suitors.."
Dick Smith has always been a great advocate for GA adventure, having made one or two expeditions himself over the years and assisted in many more. It's therefore a natural move for him to stump up an exquisite trophy for the first person to fly an electric plane from the UK to Darwin. That will be a gargantuan task with the current technology, and one that will probably take longer than the 27 days Keith and Ross Smith completed the journey in back in 1919. That's with current technology. Future technology is likely to see hydrogen-electric aircraft achieving earth-rounding endurance long before battery powertrains get there, which places companies like Stralis Aircraft in the box seat to claim Dick's Lightning Woman. Stralis is due for their first flight by the end of this year, producing a viable powertrain in the second half of next year. With that in their back pocket, I can imagine them shipping an A36-HE to the UK and flying it home. Is there a better way to demonstrate the capability of your system than stretching its legs across the world? With companies like Dovetail Electric Aircraft and ZeroAvia also making huge leaps in development, Lightning Woman should have plenty of suitors. However, flying that route in a fossil-fueled GA aeroplane is arduous enough due to the unreliability of avgas in non-GA countries. How are they going to go with hydrogen? But that's just one of many obstacles that innovative developers will overcome with time. And until they do, Lightning Woman will have to be a lady in waiting.
Acrobat has finished searching the document. No matches were found. That's the response I got when I tried to find the word "aviation" in the Liberal Party's policy document. The word is literally not in there. Given that the regions are shaping up as key battlegrounds, the National Party is in the Coalition as well and the ALP has shown they're prepared to support regional connections by buying REX if needed, you would think the Coalition would make their weapons known to the world. The section on regions doesn't mention REX or any other regional service, almost like Peter Dutton has decided it's a fight they can't win, so they won't pick it. I will concede there may be some policy yet to find its way to the surface, and the office of Shadow Minister Bridget McKenzie has been asked if that is the case. Both the Coalition and the ALP are expected to launch their campaigns this Sunday, so there may be something forthcoming after that. The ALP has taken a stance that the White Paper will do, which has been backed by drip-fed announcements of regional airport funding. Strangely, the minister has been missing from the aviation community, with many asking, for example, why she was not at Avalon. There is a difference between being transparent and being invisible, and whilst the former is desirable the latter is accepted as an indication of indifference. Indifference is not a characteristic you want to be tagged with going into a very tight election that is beginning to smell like a hung parliament.
Next week, you won't be getting the Australian Flying eNews on Friday, you'll get it on Wednesday! That's all about Easter and people hitting the road early. And the week after that will also not be on Friday 25 April (ANZAC Day), but rather delayed until Monday 28 April. For those that regularly rely on this column to tell them it's Friday, we do apologise. You'll have to find something else to tell you the weekend is here. We should resume our Friday cadence after that.
May your gauges always be in the green,
Hitch