[Peetwo]

DW1 references - Episode IV

Audio files:

DW1 BrisVegas - VIPA

DW1 BrisVegas - Mr Wheeler & Prof Butler

DW1 BrisVegas - Martin, Tynne & Manning

DW1 BrisVegas - Stevens & Meadows

Episode III

AusALPA audio file: DW1 Melbourne - AusALPA


YMML Hansard link - see HERE :

AusALPA opening statement:

Capt. Butt : Thank you for giving us the opportunity to provide you with the considered views of Australia's professional pilots. My name is Murray Butt, and I appear today as President of the Australian Airline Pilots' Association, AusALPA. I am accompanied by AusALPA vice-president, Captain David Booth, from AFAP, and by Shane Loney and Dick MacKerras from AIPA, although today we are all wearing the same AusALPA hat.

AusALPA is the safety and technical umbrella organisation for the Australian and International Pilots Association, AIPA, of which I am also president, and the Australian Federation of Air Pilots, AFAP. Together we represent over 5,000 members and the vast majority of Australia's professional pilots across all industry sectors. AusALPA is the Australian member association of IFALPA, the International Federation of Airline Pilots' Associations. IFALPA is recognised worldwide in the realm of safety and technical expertise. In fact, it is one of only a few non-government bodies granted permanent observer status to the Air Navigation Commission of the International Civil Aviation Organization, which sets global standards for civil aviation. I am currently a Qantas A380 captain, Captain Booth is a 737 captain and the rest of our team here cover a wide range of aviation experience.

This inquiry has highlighted a number of issues related to AusALPA's operations, and our concern is focused on the safety issues. There is not a professional pilot in Australia who does not harbour some degree of concern about the risks posed by unmanned aerial systems and how these risks are being managed This concern is shared around the world; every major aviation body, including regulators, business associations, air traffic control agencies and pilot representatives have expressed concern at how the risks are being managed.

As aviators, we accept that unmanned aerial systems and their rapidly increasing capabilities offer society great economic benefits. We also accept that the genie is out of the bottle in terms of the rapid expansion of cheap recreational drones and we must now follow the lead of those earlier movers like the EU and the US who recognised the magnitude of the risks and act quickly to better address the situation in Australia.

As this committee confirmed at estimates, we do not know how large the RPA fleet really is. Perhaps what was not made as clear are the unknowns. We do not know the geographical distribution of operations, nor do we know what the operator demographics are. We also do not know if the operator population has the same distribution of cowboys and criminals as the general population. We do not know with any scientific vigour the probability of an aircraft-RPA collision either in general, by industry sector or by aircraft type. Critically, we do not know with any certainty what the consequences are likely to be of an aircraft-RPA collision. This is not just about big engines swallowing little RPAs with relative ease. It is about a range of vulnerabilities and much more adverse outcomes across all sizes and types of aircraft, including general aviation aircraft and helicopters that perform vital work in the vast expanses of rural Australia.

I would therefore like to set out for the committee our views on these issues. AusALPA strongly believes that the risk-mitigation framework must be properly based on the scientific investigation of those unknowns. The conclusions must be peer reviewed and be of world-class standard. We must also empower technologies that aid us in separating RPAs from manned aircraft. We must develop robust strategies that permit the co-existence of RPAs and manned aircraft.

A good example of such a strategy was released 10 days ago by SESAR, the Single European Sky ATM Research, on their project called U-Space. It is intended to make RPAS use in European low-level airspace safe, secure and environmentally friendly by 2019.

We must all accept that safety costs money and that, without being trite, accidents cost more. While we recognise that we must be careful not to create an expensive and cumbersome response that hinders innovation or unnecessarily curtails certain activities, we also believe that the quest for safe airspace for manned aircraft operations must have priority over the needs of RPAS operations, particularly for recreational users.

It is fundamental that we must protect the safety of manned aviation as our primary requirement. That leads me briefly to CASA's approach to RPAS risk management. There is no doubt that CASA's light regulatory touch might please the anti-red-tape brigade, but we at AusALPA are not so convinced. It is certainly out of step with the rest of the world. While the argument was made at estimates that there is no evidence of an unacceptable risk, we see two problems. First, there has been little or no peer-reviewed scientific investigation of the unknowns. Second, should the evidence of risk suddenly emerge, the regulatory horse will already have bolted.

AusALPA believes that CASA's current regulatory approach is a political rather than a safety response to what is now clearly a rear-guard action. It was developed by well-intentioned people who made two key political decisions: one, that there would be no register; and, two, that a sub-two kilogram vehicle could be portrayed as posing an acceptable risk to aircraft and persons on the ground. The reason that we describe these decisions political is simple: registers are expensive to set up and run and the two kilogram weight devisor effectively threw the most popular and affordable vehicles out of regulatory sight; thereby removing an unfunded surveillance and enforcement activity from an already stressed CASA budget.

AusALPA does not agree that CASA has acted in the best interests of the Australian people. Therefore, we offer the committee the following recommendations. AusALPA believes a registration framework is essential. Setting out a practical registration scheme with strong deterrents against noncompliance services notice to all users that they are operating in a highly regulated system—hopefully leading users to explore and understand the legal and safety constraints on RPAS operation and the broader aviation context. It will ensure that the necessary safety, education and compliance knowledge can be delivered directly to the major source of risk—RPAS operators.

Mandatory education linked with registration will not prevent laziness or incompetence but it will remove any excuse. However, we need to be balanced, so the registration framework should be targeted only at vehicles and systems that are identified as posing an unacceptable risk to aircraft and persons on the ground. Nonetheless, registration alone will not be sufficient. As I mentioned earlier, geofencing and other constraining technologies must also be in the mix. They are an integral part of solutions in jurisdictions like the EU, which have committed to integrate drones safely into their airspace.

There will always a small risk of the population who will ignore the law, just as they will ignore the risk that their inappropriate RPAS operations may create. For that group, more active protective technologies will need to be pursued for high-risk airspace. There are a range of technologies that can identify and locate both an RPA and its ground operator, allowing law enforcement to act on incidents of inadvertent or unlawful use. I draw the committee's attention to systems like SkyTracker, a passive system that would monitor capital city airports. Like passenger screening, a multifaceted approach may be required to cater for the different size and complexity of Australian airport infrastructure. Much more work needs to be done to establish where to draw the regulatory line around acceptable risk to people and aircraft.

I will conclude by noting some of the research now becoming available. No-one sitting at this table before you today believes that the potential damage from a collision of a 1.99 kilogram RPA with a low-capacity RPT aircraft, a helicopter or a range of general aviation aircraft, will not result in an accident. Emerging work being done overseas by universities and government agencies within the major aircraft certification jurisdictions is already likely to require a significant rethink of certification risk assessments. In May 2015, the FAA created their Center of Excellence for Unmanned Aircraft Systems, originally comprising 15 universities, which has now expanded to form the Alliance for System Safety of UAS through Research Excellence, or ASSURE, which now boasts 23 of the world's leading research institutions and 100 leading industry and government partners.

On 28 April this year ASSURE released the peer reviewed, 195-page, UAS ground collision severity evaluation final report. While this report raises as many questions as it answers, it nonetheless highlights the complexity of that subject and the scientific rigour required to act as a policy basis. Importantly, the methodology shows quite clearly that there is a minimal connection between human trauma studies for ground collisions and airborne collision damage outcomes. It is reasonably open to conclude that RPA collision dynamics are different from bird strikes. Clearly, one regulatory size does not fit all situations.

The much more vital research from ASSURE, their UAS airborne collision severity evaluation, is yet to come and will most certainly take considerable time to deliver. It is most concerning to us that, in the mean time, we are forced to hope that CASA was close to the mark in deciding that (1) there was minimal likelihood of a manned aircraft colliding with a sub-two kilogram RPA anywhere one can be operated and a sub-25 kilogram RPA operated on a personal property adjacent to airports and (2) if it did happen that it would not result in the loss of the aircraft. Thank you for your patience. We are happy to take questions.

CHAIR: Thank you. I am so glad you checked out the Hansard for Senate estimates, where we heard that we have not had a drone hit yet, so what are we worried about—nothing to worry about there!

Senator O'SULLIVAN:  I almost do not know where to start, other than to say, without speaking for my colleagues, I think you will find that we support all but 100 per cent of your observations. I have been waiting anxiously to hear from your group, because, really, you are the front line of failure in some respects. If there is a catastrophic event it is likely to have been between an unmanned aircraft and one of your manned aircraft. Let me ask some bleeding obvious questions. I have started to try to create a pattern in my examination of witnesses.

---

Senator O'SULLIVAN:  In fact, in most of those instances, if not all, the aircraft was operating in a predictable manner within the range and parameters in which it was intended to operate at that time and in that place, whereas the intruder—the burglar in the situation—on 100 per cent of occasions has been the unmanned aircraft. I am going to ask you a controversial question and you might want to avoid it. When you watched the performance of CASA at the estimates hearings in Canberra, were you left feeling as if they might not be attending upon this with the same sense of urgency that others might have?

Capt. Butt : I was not present at the CASA hearings, but if any of my colleagues—

Unidentified speaker: It is a dangerous question.

Senator O'SULLIVAN:  It is no more dangerous than the drones—

Capt. Booth : The observation of our members—I am speaking as a president but I am also representing 4½ member pilots—is that the approach taken by CASA to risk management is deeply concerning—that is, we do not yet have an accident or damage and therefore there is no risk. If regulation in other areas of aviation safety and road transport safety went along similar lines, that would be very problematic. I think CASA simply does not regulate in that manner. They look at risk, they look at possible consequences, but I guess one of the problems here is that no impact study has yet been completed. That is one of the main thrusts in our submission—that is, the need for a rigorous damage assessment exercise to be funded by the Australian government and other regulators to determine the extent of damage.

CHAIR: This inquiry came about because Senator O'Sullivan and I sat down in the halls of parliament one day. We got some briefings, because CASA wanted to take the foot of the accelerator a little bit with all these little things, but we actually said 'Bulldust! Hang on, we're going to have an inquiry.' Otherwise it would have slipped through.

Capt. Booth : Indeed, and when we found out about the 150-odd ATSB events in 2016, just prior to the amendment of 101 in September last year, it was alarming from our point of view that there seemed to be a disconnect between the ATSB and CASA in making that rule making in relation to sub-two-kilos when clearly there was a proliferation occurring. I have shared airspace with a drone at 12,000 feet north of Sydney on arrival and have been told 'Hazard alert—UAV in your area,' and it is alarming as an RPT pilot to hear that. Of course, in Sydney Airport, which is a hotspot, probably on fewer than five occasions there has been drone activity on the ADIS on arrival—one time over Kurnell, which is directly on the approach path to runway 34R, and similarly from landings to the south at Sydney Airport. Sydney no doubt is a hotspot as 70 per cent of the activity is around the Sydney area, and I am guessing that a lot of that is sub-two-kilograms.

Senator O'SULLIVAN:  Did you happen to hear CASA, in their risk profile, no less than the CEO suggested that if you wanted to have an analogy it was someone riding their bicycle along the footpath—a drone in the air and a man on a bicycle on the ground. In my words, not yours, it is absolutely preposterous to try to make an example of that size. Can any of you justify the argument that the person in charge of one piece of tin requires no training—none—requires no proficiency testing, no medical tests, and no rules about their sobriety or their age or their mental condition, whereas with the other piece of tin—and I don't mean particularly with you gentlemen as it is a lifelong journey of education in your space to get your pilot's licence and progress through and have this privilege to fly in your profession—can you think of even one single remote argument as to why one ought not to be as competently trained and tested for proficiency as the other?

Capt. Butt : The biggest point about that is the proximity of the two pieces of tin. If that person could be contained in an area in which they are the only person affected by that area there may be an argument, but that is not what we are talking about here. The industry has grown so quickly, without regulation, that there is no chance of that being the case.

---

Capt. MacKerras : I do not want to sound like a proponent for the drone industry, but the reality is that they are working flat out at the moment on a whole bunch of technologies—

Senator O'SULLIVAN:  I am not interested in tomorrow's sunrise. I am talking about the current human capacity and the current technologies.

Capt. Booth : The answer is you cannot do that, because there is pilot deconfliction. Essentially, there is no deconfliction plan. We have read in the media about Amazon and Australia Post doing deliveries. There is no deconfliction plan. Clearly it is an economically driven exercise. It is like driverless cars. It is very appealing for the general population, but as operators we know that there is no way of ensuring there is not a collision risk. Of course, you are quite right, there will be conflict aplenty when you get proliferation of drones in suburbia doing this sort of delivery activity.

Senator O'SULLIVAN:  One of the fears I have is that I am watching a regulator who just does not seem to have its head in the space. I am hearing a bit of silence from my side of government. If you want to measure things, it took eight months from when the minister said we will have an inquiry by the regulator to getting that fairly detailed and complex document there with about nine lines on it. Here we are. Honestly I could have knocked that up at breakfast this morning in a more detailed form. I will send a message to you and then I will finish. We need all the loud voices we can get in this space because government only knows one thing, and that is the fear of the masses expressing themselves in a genuine way when there is a matter of concern I think of this magnitude confronting our society. I do not think we have had such a technical challenge in terms of absorbing this IT into our operating days since people started to drive along with a telephone up to their ear from a safety perspective. There is something you can do. You are a very powerful voice. The flying public listen very carefully. They have got a very sensitive ear to the messages that come from you people, given you are at the pointy end and we are all there for the grace of you.

Thank you, Chair.

---

Capt. MacKerras : The decision not to regulate sub-two-kilo drones says that CASA has identified that they do not believe there is any risk in that weight class.

Senator O'SULLIVAN:  We have seen their evidence. They commissioned a peer reviewed academic study on the issue—

Capt. MacKerras : I do not think it was peer reviewed.

Senator O'SULLIVAN:  Well, they had not read it—which had some critical things to say about the prospects. One of the safety officers from CASA talked to us. I have had 20 years investigating catastrophic international flights. He tried to define to me what the difference was between a catastrophic crash and just a crash. He said, 'Well, it's not catastrophic if it just takes the engine out; you've got another engine.' I thought to myself, 'You know, wouldn't it be lovely, sitting there looking out the window and going, "We've only done one. We've got another one here."' It was just a nonsense.

Mr Loney : I can also comment on the assessment of risk and what you do about it. We have heard the references to bird strikes by CASA. And, of course, the airport authorities go to a lot of effort to find the right kinds of grasses and cut them to the right length to scare birds. They do everything in their power to keep birds away from the airport environments and the flight paths of the aeroplanes. So, if we think it is good enough and important enough to deploy teams in that way, how can we say that a two-kilogram drone is of no consequence?

Senator O'SULLIVAN:  We need your organisation's voice, Mr Butt. You should not fear anything from government by speaking out very strongly on this. We are going to; we continue to. The three of us will never be promoted in government, no matter which side is in, because we are a bit strong with our language around this stuff. We just need your voice, seriously.