McLean Richard wrote:
You can add me as a yes to the poll question too. I think the issue may hinge on how we get these reports ... which is probably closely related to the potential defamation/liability issues eluded to by ops. Putting all the gory details in the magazine is probably not the best idea from a marketing point of view anyway, so perhaps a seperate newsletter generated by the ops panel & sent to CFI's is the answer? I came back to gliding 6 years ago & have since been alarmed at the lack of 'safety consciousness' there is in gliding ops compared to other forms of aviation that I have experienced (GA & military). I think a large part of that is due to the fact that we no longer read regular accident & incident reports.
Couple of notes on this thread. Ian Patching said he wanted CASA to take a more active role. Well, that's nice, but they don't want to. They don't even issue incident report numbers for gliding-related activites anymore. I feel like I need to point out the elephant in the room here: CASA doesn't want to play a part. Not interested. Their future is in regulation and surveillance of commercial aviation: Operations where innocent members of the public have a likelihood of being hurt or killed when things go wrong. That means they'll probably get interested in gliding-related accidents or incidents involving passengers (non-GFA members), but if everyone involved is a GFA member they're more than happy to just pass everything over to the GFA (i.e., the federation of us) on the understanding that we'll keep our own house in order), because they're too busy worrying about Qantas, Virgin Blue and Rex to give a crap about sailplanes. They do the same thing with all sports aviation. I'm pretty sure that they only give a rat's arse about GA light aircraft because they tend to operate at the same airports as RPT, and hence represent a risk to RPT passengers. Gliding usually doesn't, so they don't care. End of story. This hasn't been an overnight change, they've been tending in that direction for something close to a decade now. Expecting them to abandon that evolutionary process and turn around and say, "Well, actually, we ought to give a damn about gliders after all," is pretty silly. They've already sensibly reached the conclusion which I think several people in this mailing list have completely failed to grasp, which is that we're all in aviation because we want to be, if we hurt ourselves it's our own stupid fault, so if we don't want to get hurt we need to keep our own houses in order without expecting the Government to clean up the mess when we get it wrong. Secondly, and more directly addressing your comments, Richard: Everyone in the world has a ready-made source of accident data which they can use to draw their own conclusions and learn their own lessons about safety culture in Australia. CASA publishes "Flight Safety Australia" every couple of months and mails it out to anyone on their list; If you're not on their list you can get it anyway by visiting http://www.casa.gov.au/fsa/ and downloading the PDFs. One you do that, however, you learn something seriously depressing, which has been covered on this list ad-nauseum in recent years: Pilots worked out how to kill themselves a century ago, and since then they've all been making more or less the same mistakes over and over and over again. The root causes are always the same, the actions which those causes stimulate are also the same, and the inevitable results remain disappointingly the same. It doesn't even vary much between aviation disciplines, which is why FSA (which only occasionally covers gliders) is useful to us anyway. That means there's very little benefit in 2005 to spreading around a few paragraphs worth of report about each and every accident that occurs. When one does that, the invariable result is that you get mind-numbing repetition of wheels-ups, low-level accidental spins, poor decision-making while close to the ground, overload-related brain failure at critical moments, inadequate situational awareness, poor look-out, sloppy adherence to procedures despite adequate training in how to apply them, and inadequate planning. We see that in Soaring Australia every month, in the HGFA accident reports. "Oh, look, someone else has been dumped when they went over the back of the ridge. And look, yet another person has been upset by turbulent thermic air in weak conditions on a ridge. Oh, here's one we haven't seen for two or three months, another low air- time pilot has launched in conditions beyond his experience level, ballooned immediately after launch, stalled, and broken his leg." I'm pretty sure that HGFA are really just going through the motions by publishing their list every month, because very little is really learned by readers of those reports (reports which might as well have been produced by a robot with half a dozen buttons which can be pressed to churn out accident reports from a handful of predefined templates). What -is- changing, and the thing we -can- learn from, is techniques to manage risk and complexity to cut-down on those cookie-cutter style accident reports. The Reason Model in the 1980's was revolutionary, and has completely changed aviation safety management. And that management evolves over time as the holistic picture is supplemented by new information (even though the new information, in isolation on a pro-forma accident report, is pretty useless as a learning tool). The GFA is actually pretty good at that: Anyone who has been to the safety seminar roadshows over the last half-dozen years should find it pretty obvious that there's a lot of analysis going on inside the GFA and in cooperation with other aviation bodies to work out root causes and provide an awareness of what they are and the techniques to overcome them. The notes about pilot overload which were stressed this year are a good example of that. I think there are individuals on this mailing list (and, for that matter, throughout the gliding movement) who clamour for detailed, regular, published accident reports for no reason other than the fact that it's common knowledge that we can learn useful stuff from reports in that format. But where did the "common knowledge" come from? Have a think about it: Is there -really- anything new to learn that we don't already know from a report that says someone had an accidental spin and killed themselves? Or that they can't quite remember why because they went into shock and rationalized the causes after the event when they'd had time to think about it, but they happened to slam their glider into a landing hard enough to bash both wheels into the fuselage? What are you people really hoping to get out of it? And before someone challenges me to say why I'm so opposed to the release of such data: Actually I'm not. I couldn't care less. If the GFA wants to release such data, I won't object. But there's a deep-seated strain of misunderstanding about accident investigation running through some of the people who care about it strongly enough to keep bringing it up all the time, and I feel compelled to get some kind of explanation out of those people to say why they think publication is so important. Because everyone reading this knows, *KNOWS*, that even if Soaring Australia and GFA's web site happened to be chock-full of accident reports, people would still land heavily, still take-off without canopies, still spin-in from 250' because they've climbed too steeply on winch launches, still collide with each other, and still come into heavy contact with bits of geography in ways that are strongly suggestive of the possibility that they forgot about circuit planning during an outlanding and instead opted to drag their wingtip through a fence during a hasty turn onto a last-minute final approach into the only paddock they could see at the time. We can already predict each year's accidents which such annoying precision that we can more or less write the reports before the accidents happen, so what is there to gain from publishing them? What are you going to -do- with the data when you have it? How are you going to improve things? Or is clamouring for accident data the aviation equivalent of gawking at road accidents as the traffic slowly parades past, feeling good about the fact that it isn't you? - mark -------------------------------------------------------------------- I tried an internal modem, [EMAIL PROTECTED] but it hurt when I walked. Mark Newton ----- Voice: +61-4-1620-2223 ------------- Fax: +61-8-82231777 ----- _______________________________________________ Aus-soaring mailing list [email protected] To check or change subscription details, visit: http://lists.internode.on.net/mailman/listinfo/aus-soaring
