Hi Wombat,
You said:
"The Police/Coroner will usually seek the assistance of the GFA in the case of
a gliding accident, ........."
Should there be any concern about this? I have some, so perhaps you could
allay my concerns.
Chris
----- Original Message -----
From: Mike Cleaver
To: Discussion of issues relating to Soaring in Australia.
Sent: Wednesday, April 25, 2012 4:40 PM
Subject: Re: [Aus-soaring] GFA Site/accident
John and others
The ATSB has a system for classifying accidents and incidents - see on their
web site http://www.atsb.gov.au/about_atsb/investigation-procedures.aspx and
http://www.atsb.gov.au/about_atsb/investigation-procedures.aspx#fn2
- the latter identifies what the various levels of investigation involve in
terms of ATSB resources.
Sport and recreational aviation accidents - even fatal ones - are almost
never accorded a classification higher than 4, which means that after the
recording of various factual information, the investigation is either carried
out with one or two ATSB investigators or may be referred to another agency. In
the case of a fatality this is often the police force in the State or Territory
where the accident occurred - either for potential crime investigation or more
likely for the Coroner to investigate. The Police/Coroner will usually seek the
assistance of the GFA in the case of a gliding accident, but the GFA generally
regards itself as under-resourced to carry out aviation accident
investigations, as no funding is provided from Government sources to train and
equip investigators.In any event the funding provided by Government to the ATSB
is such that most accidents are not investigated in any level of detail, unless
they involve passenger transport operations in large or medium capacity
aircraft. The days when ATSB investigated sport aviation accidents to any
greater extent than this ended over 20 years ago, and are not likely to return.
While gliding fatalities are investigated by TAIC in New Zealand, that is not
the case here, and the amount of knowledge gained from NZ investigations is not
significantly higher than here.
A further factor that militates against the GFA conducting and publishing
accident reports is the fact that, unlike Government agencies, the investigator
may be held personally liable for the way findings are reported, and challenged
by relatives of the deceased or others who have suffered personal or property
loss, or by survivors of the event who may claim some degree of negligence
(read financial compensation for some assumed fault by the GFA or its members)
or defamation as a consequence of the reporting.
This has the potential to affect all of us, whereas an ATSB investigation is
rarely handled this way. Note that this is a fact in spite of the acknowledged
purpose of accident investigations being to prevent recurrences and identify
procedures or training that may assist in this goal: accident investigators do
not lay blame for occurrences (and sometimes it is hard to read into their
reports any reference to even obvious breaches of the law or safe operating
procedures).
This is why we have to wait so long for a Coroner to produce a report before
we can make changes to the system, especially where training or procedure
changes are involved, or airworthiness actions.
Wombat
On 25/04/2012 12:09 PM, john.mcfarlane wrote:
I would have thought that this is a mandated reportable incident via the
Fed Gov body delegated with that authority - ATSB.
Will there be a formal report from the ATSB?
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: [email protected]
Sent: Monday, 23 April 2012 4:17
To: Discussion of issues relating to Soaring in Australia.
<[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [Aus-soaring] GFA Site/accident
Re accident prevention, in this instance we will have to wait on the
Coroner's report, which I would not expect any time soon. It may be able to
pinpoint a problem, and if so we - that is the collective we - can then act.
However I am not holding my breath on this one.
Regards,
Gary
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