[Peetwo]

Angel Flight Inquiry report tabled - 

Well I'll be, this must be the world's quickest turn around on a Senate committee inquiry report since forever? Well at least since the Heff left the building...  

https://auntypru.com/wp-content/uploads/...report.pdf

List of Recommendations

Recommendation 1

1.74 The committee recommends that the Civil Aviation Safety Authority amend the Civil Aviation (Commercial Service Flights – Conditions on Flight Crew Licences) Instrument 2019 to remove the provisions for additional aeroplane maintenance requirements, which are beyond those required for airworthiness in the general aviation sector.

Recommendation 2

1.78 The committee recommends that the Civil Aviation Safety Authority amend the Civil Aviation (Commercial Service Flights – Conditions on Flight Crew Licences) Instrument 2019 to clarify what constitutes the 'operating crew' for a community service flight, particularly as this relates to additional pilots and mentoring arrangements.

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My ROFLMAO moment - 

Courtesy of Dr Aleck: 

1.42 Dr Jonathan Aleck, Executive Manager of Legal and Regulatory Affairs at CASA, laid out the objective of CASA's approach to this issue:

'"..Our objective here is not to specifically address what caused those two accidents; it's to address what kinds of things can cause incidents and accidents of this kind. We're being prospective. If we were to wait for sufficiently robust data to support an evidence based decision for every individual decision we took in this space, we would have to wait for a dozen or more accidents to occur..."

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Also from the report it would appear that additional correspondence has been tabled and reviewed within the last week and a half which in the scheme of things is IMO significant:

1  Correspondence from Angel Flight, dated and received 29 September 2019, regarding a safety recommendation from the Australian Transport Safety Bureau.

(my bold)

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September 26, 2019


We have been requested by Angel Flight Australia to write to your committee, outlining our operation and the minimum requirements we demand for volunteer pilots flying for our organization. We operate in a similar fashion to Angel Flight Australia, and we assisted them in the setting up of that charity using our model.

All of our coordinated flights are under Part 95 category, and as such, there are no regulatory requirements imposed by the FAA other than the standard rules which apply to private flights in the USA. In 2012 the FAA published a set of recommendations; however, these were not enacted into law. We have chosen to adopt some of the recommendations: there are different rules for commercial operators who seek exemptions from the commercial rules, but these do not apply to us as we operate only under the private flight category.

To date we have undertaken 82,000 missions- defined as the passenger-carrying leg only (and approximately 140,000 flight sectors including the positioning and return flights). Although about 75% of our pilots hold instrument ratings, many of our flights are conducted under the VFR flight regulations. The climates in the Southwest US is similar to much of Australia, and VFR flight is suitable. Occasionally weather is bad enough to make conditions not suitable to fly under IFR.

The minimum standards we require are on the following page.

Sincerely,


Cheri Cimmarrusti
Associate Executive Director
Angel Flight West

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2  Correspondence to the committee from Angel Flight West (US), dated 26 September 2019, regarding its minimum standards for operation. Received 27 September 2019.

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ATSB SAFETY RECOMMENDATION


The Australian Transport Safety Bureau recommends that Angel Flight Australia
takes action to enable it to consider the safety benefits of using commercial flights
where they are available to transport its passengers.

ANGEL FLIGHT RESPONSE

Angel Flight has considered the recommendation carefully and has determined that
it maintain its current policy of giving priority to using private flights where possible
and to continue to use regular public transport flights when private flights are
cancelled or unavailable, and for transfers between capital cities.

The reasons for our decisions are:

Angel Flight rejects the claim in the ATSB report that, for Angel Flight
passenger carrying flights, the “fatal accident rate was more than seven
times higher per flight than other private flights” as invalid.

A valid analysis addressing passenger risks would require comparison of
passenger carrying Angel Flights and other passenger carrying private
flights. Since no such data are available for other private operations, the
only reasonable comparison is between all Angel Flight operations and all
other private operations. Even then, results must be treated cautiously
because an unknown proportion of private operations involve circuit
training and short local flying whereas all Angel Flight operations involve
flights with an average sector length of 1.5 hours.

The analysis in Table B2 on page 69 shows that, when all Angel Flight
sectors are included, the fatal accident rates are 0.5 and 0.2 per 10,000
flights for Angel Flight and other private flights respectively, and the
difference is not significant. Furthermore, when all accidents are included,
the rates are 1.1 and 1.5 per 10,000 flights for Angel Flight and other
private flights respectively.

Angel Flight rejects the claim in the ATSB report that “community service
flights conducted on behalf of Angel Flight Australia (Angel Flight) had
substantially more occurrences …… per flight than other private operations”
as invalid.

ATSB has compared Angel Flight operations, approximately 95% of which
operate to and from Class C and D airspace with other private operations
where an unknown, but undoubtedly much lower, proportion of flights are
in controlled airspace. Angel Flight has been unable to find any data that
would permit a valid comparison of similar operations for other private
flights.

The ATSB report acknowledges, in the Safety Summary, that “The types of
occurrences where flights organised by Angel Flight were statistically overrepresented
(as a rate per flight) compared to other private operations
were consistent with these operational differences.” However, the report
then immediately ignores the vastly different operating environments and
claims that the difference “indicated an elevated and different risk profile in
Angel Flight”.

Still reading and absorbing the report but so far my takeaways from this are;

(a) this committee is motivated and clearly much more focused on cutting through the bureaucratic waffle, than what we saw under the Chairmanship of Barry O'Obfuscation -   

(b) around the recommendations, clearly the CASA have cut a deal with the Senate to again water down the CSF instrument. Must be about time that the whole instrument was binned and Dr Aleck was sent off with his golden parachute to play with his last remaining marbles...   

Incoming...


MTF...P2 

Ps I note, that despite the AF response correspondence to the ATSB's SR being sent at least 1 week ago, there has been no corresponding update published on the ATSB website: https://www.atsb.gov.au/publications/inv...069-si-01/