[Peetwo]

Oz Flying's Hitch on Oliver Skidmore's future forum talkfest...

CASA Director of Aviation Safety Mark Skidmore address the Flightplan 2030 forum in Mildura. (Steve Hitchen)



First Flightplan 2030 Forum encourages CASA
31 Jul 2015

A good turn-out and participation level at CASA's first Flightpath 2030 forum in Mildura yesterday has encouraged the regulator to hold further events in other locations.

Thirty-five people attended the forum at Mildura Golf Resort, coming from all over Victoria, South Australia and NSW.

"I'm very happy with the way it went," said CASA Director of Aviation Safety, Mark Skidmore. "The opportunity to engage with people was good. There's obviously still some issues out here, so it was an opportunity to get some idea of those.

"A lot of them were things I'm already aware of, but it's important to get them right from the people as well.

"Certainly the maintenance training is something we need to think about, and of course Part 61 came up as did the Cessna SIDs.

"But also some of the ideas about the future that came out were great, and they're certainly areas that CASA can look at. Like ADS-B and the collision avoidance aspect of that. We need to make sure that we can get the safety outcome from that. So there's some opportunities there."

Skidmore also said he was encouraged by the Mildura forum, and would now look at scheduling events in other regions around Australia.

"I thought this was a really good success and now I've got to look at how we can actually get out there. I'm going to have to make some time to do this."

The forum gave members of the aviation community to present problems directly to Skidmore. Issues raised from the floor included:

• Current regulations are not user-friendly and people cannot comply with regulations they don't understand
  
• Navaids being shut down reduces safety in some areas
  
• Flight Safety Australia now being electronic only
  
• CASA should be able to influence government policy over aviation and not use policy as an excuse for inaction
  
• Part 147 maintenance training produces engineers that are not as good as those who did full apprenticeships
  
• Inspection under the Cessna SIDs can leave the aircraft needing further maintenance because the inspection was done
  
• Does CASA have control over the remotely-piloted aircraft issue, particularly in relation to drones used in fire areas?
  
• Aviation medicals, processing and a lack of DAMEs
  
• Why has CASA stopped producing safety wall posters?
  
• It appears that those at CASA who write Service Difficulty Reports don't seem to understand the problem and often the SDR seems not to relate to the issue
  
• Part 61 implementation.
  
  

Mark Skidmore answered each question, or acknowleged that CASA would have to do something about the issue. Only questions about the Aviation Security Identification Card (ASIC) brought no promise of action, because CASA is only an issuing authority and is not reponsible for the ASIC requirements.

The group also discussed many issues facing aviation safety in the future, including:

• The future availability of avgas
  
• Ageing aircraft
  
• The need for CASA to approve new technology in training and recency
  
• CASA will need to be an adaptable and flexible organisation
  
• ADS-B and the ability to use it for collision avoidance
  
• Cost will dominate the future of aviation, and the regulations need to take that into account
  
• The need for CASA to cut red tape for charter operators wanting to move from older twins to single-engine turbo-props
  
• Commonsense is missing from the regulators, and needs to be injected
  
• Revisions to FAR23 and the introduction of ASTM F44 for light aircraft will mean CASA needs to be open to alternative means of compliance
  
  

Skidmore also told the group he was working with The Australian Aviation Associations Forum and the Standards Consultative Committee to establish an advisory panel.

Dates and locations of future Flightplan 2030 forums will be released when available.

"..Thirty-five people.." If nothing else changes I wonder how many would be in attendance this time in 2030??
And here was Hitch's take on the Oliver's talkfest in his weekly wrap:

..It's clear that general aviation's future will not resemble what we have today very much at all. The industry looks set to benefit from developments that will be recorded in aviation history as a boundary between eras. Regulators are beginning to understand the need for less prescriptive legislation that will enable new technology to adopted far more easily, so GA can start to look more like an advanced industry rather than the throw-back to the 1950s that it does today. Currently, getting approvals for new avionics, safety systems, navigation systems, construction materials and even production methods is so costly that in many cases it is not economical to go ahead with the project. When the project is scrubbed, gone too are the cost savings and improved safety levels that it would have brought. Of course, there is still the natural resistance of bureaucracies to adopt concepts they didn't invent, which will have to be overcome in order for GA to go forward technologically, economically and safely.

GA's future in Australia came under scrutiny at Mildura this week in the first of CASA's Flightplan 2030 forums. Anyone who attended would have come away with a couple of strong impressions: the concerns of the future sound very similar to the concerns of today, and that CASA is beginning to convince some of aviation's most die-hard detractors that the opportunity exists for real change. Although Mark Skidmore did not answer every question, he certainly didn't baulk anything or bluster until people's eyes glazed over. There's one change right there! For me, the biggest indicator was the optimism expressed by an operator who had been subjected to Draconian, punitive enforcement from CASA that saw him shut down twice. If anyone has the right to remain angry and pessimistic, it was this man. If he can start to see a way forward, the rest of us have little excuse in not following...

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