[Peetwo]

The ATSB SafetyWatch highlights the broad safety concerns that come out of our investigation findings and from the occurrence data reported to us by industry. The ATSB Commission urges the transport community to give heightened attention to the risk areas featured below. These are the areas where Australia’s aviation, rail and maritime communities can make safe transport systems even safer. 
SafetyWatch gives you information about each safety concern, strategies to help manage risk areas along with links to safety resources. 

The ATSB will add or remove topics over the coming months to reflect current information on safety trends and occurrences. 

Have your say at the Chief Commissioner's blog InFocus
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Related: SafetyWatch
 

Still working on joining the dots with all this and in the coming days we (PAIN) hope to post further findings & conclusions.

Needless to say it would seem from the evidence derived from many sections of the ATSB website (including the page above), that the ATSB Commission & Executive Management team, are simply delaying & obfuscating their promised proactive actions to the Minister, the Parliament & the travelling public. 

In the process this mob continues to bring the previous excellent reputation of the ATSB/BASI into ill repute, while the Chief Commissioner keeps thumbing his nose at the disturbing findings & excellent recommendations of the RRAT Senate Committee (PelAir inquiry), the TSBC & the Forsyth review, in some vain attempt to wait it out till public & industry scrutiny wanes.
Well I'm here to tell the CC, the Commission & the EMT, that is not going to happen...

Ok to the Safety Watch page (above) which I happen to think is an excellent initiative. However that is only if properly promoted, maintained & updated, sadly this does not appear to be happening.

In reference to the Ferryman post & Marty's list of contributory factors...

Contributing Factors


Contributing factors (not exhaustive) as outlined above include the following:

• The FMC waypoints and vertical altitude requirements were not correctly crosschecked by the crew.
  
• The Boeing 777’s FMC is restrictive when selecting visual arrivals. It doesn’t provide VNAV ‘enabled’ runway thresholds or the feature to extend a path from the crossing height.
  
• It’s possible that there wasn’t suitable awareness among crew on how the user created waypoints should be used to ensure a correct 3° path.
  
• After a 14 hour flight, it’s highly likely that all crew were fatigued and far more likely to make errors.
  
• The long haul crew are, likely any global long-haul crew, on the verge of being perpetually uncurrent. It may have been months since any of them had flown an approach to Melbourne’s RW34.
  
• Although automation shouldn’t be discouraged, it is expected that, consisted with any visual approach, crew should not be distracted from monitoring external references.
  
• The RW34 Victor arrival sets an early expectation for an initial high rate of descent.
  
• The crew made attempts to unsuccessfully resolve the automated high rate of descent with another form of automation (V/S, Vertical Speed) when disconnecting automatics might have been more prudent.
  
• The Boeing 777 FMC does not facilitate easy creation of waypoints off the runway threshold.
  
• The visual approach via SHEED (with the 2500 feet altitude requirement) is poorly designed and does not provide a 3° descent profile by default. No mention is made on the chart.
  
• No VSD is available for the Boeing 777. If it were installed, the error in the vertical profile would be easily identified.
  
• No call for a go-around (from any of the three monitoring crew) was made when the aircraft vacated company stabilised approach criteria (well below two dots low on the PAPI).
  

...there is I believe two broad safety concerns off the Safety Watch page relevant to the Virgin incident.

Each of the 'safety concerns' is accompanied by a Youtube video, see here:

1. Data input errors  

  
Handling approach to land

However I would argue that both of the above Safety Watch 'safety concerns', could automatically fall within a much broader & significant 'safety concern' and that is the 'breakdown of situational awareness'. In recent years there has been several high profile accidents where unrecovered 'breakdown of SA' has been a significant causal factor (e.g. Colgan Air Flight 3407, AF447, Asiana Airlines Flight 214).

The sad reality of the obfuscating actions/inactions, the subjective editing and the beyond Reason methodology is that Australia as a signatory to ICAO is no longer a proactive, healthy contributor to the worldwide improvement of aviation safety--- --

Anyway much MTF very soon...P2