[Peetwo]

Tragedy at Hobart Airport -

Via ABC News online:

One dead, one injured in helicopter crash at Hobart airport, flights cancelled
Tue 7 Nov 2017, 7:04pm



Photo: Emergency crews attend the scene of a helicopter crash at Hobart Airport. (ABC News: Edith Bevin)

One person has died and another has been critically injured in a helicopter crash at Hobart airport.

A witness has told police he saw a helicopter come "down hard" on grass about 5 metres from the runway.

It is unclear if it was taking off or landing.

In a statement, Tasmania Police said emergency services were responding to the "serious crash" at the airport's Cambridge site, north-east of Hobart.

"It is understood this incident is impacting on airport operations, including commercial flights," police said.

Jetstar passengers have been told there will likely be no more flights out of Hobart this evening.

Passengers onboard a Qantas Link flight which was turned back before take-off reported seeing ambulances on the runway.

Fire trucks and ambulances are on the scene.

ABC employee Anne Cordiner, who is at the airport, said "there were a couple of hundred people" waiting in the departure terminal.

"People are pretty calm. We've just been told that our Jetstar flight that was due to leave for Melbourne at six o'clock has been cancelled and we've been asked to go through the check-in desk and rebook on other flights," she said.

Police will hold a media conference in about an hour.

& from the Hobart Mercury, via the Oz:

Helicopter crashes at Hobart Airport

A helicopter crash at Hobart Airport is affecting operations.

• Matthew Denholm
  
• The Australian
  
• 7:04PM November 7, 2017
  

[img=0x0]https://i1.wp.com/pixel.tcog.cp1.news.com.au/track/component/author/5f91ca65ef3233adc982dc00ae6da579/?esi=true&t_product=the-australian&t_template=s3/austemp-article_common/vertical/author/widget&td_bio=false[/img]
A helicopter crash at Hobart Airport involving two people has been described as “serious”, with debris on the runway and flights thrown into chaos.

It is understood one person is dead and another critically injured.

“Police and emergency services are responding to a serious helicopter crash at Hobart Airport with two people involved,” a police statement said a short time ago.

“It is understood this incident is impacting on airport operations, including commercial flights.”

Passengers at the airport have been told that flights in and out of the city had been suspended and reported seeing fire trucks and ambulances on the runway.

“It must be pretty bad, I’m looking at some of the staff and they are crying — it is not nice,” Scott McGinley, a passenger waiting for a flight, told The Mercury newspaper. Passengers at the airport, east of Hobart, said the crash appeared to be about 500 metres from the terminal.

Helicopter Crash at Hobart Airport. Picture: Luke bowden

The cause of the crash is unknown. There has been recent controversy over Hobart’s airspace management.

Australia’s air safety regulator last year decided against any major change to Hobart’s air space, prompting claims it was courting tragedy and continuing a cover-up over Tasmania’s bungled $6 million radar system.

The Civil Aviation Safety Authority in August last year released the findings of a review of Hobart’s airspace, ordered after a series of stories in The Australian about failures in the state’s radar system, known as TASWAM.

The Australian in 2015 revealed TASWAM was not being used to control aircraft to the ground; only as an addition tool for local tower controllers providing “procedural separation”, which relies on visual observation and communication with pilots.

This newspaper also revealed that failures in TASWAM — including planes disappearing from radar screens for minutes on end — were occurring almost monthly and that air traffic controllers had described the system as “unreliable”.

CASA responded to the criticism, and a projected 30% to 40% increase in passengers into Hobart over the next five years due to a tourism boom, by ordering an Office of Airspace Regulation review of Hobart airspace.

However, the report released last year rejected calls by pilots and Airlines of Tasmania for TASWAM to be used as they believed it was intended: to guide aircraft to the runway, rather than to only 8,500 ft as occurs currently.

Instead, the report recommended continuing with local air tower controllers using procedural separation below 8,500 feet, describing this as “appropriate”.

This was despite the report noting 16.6 per cent growth in aircraft movements at Hobart Airport between 2012 and 2015, and an 86 per cent increase at the adjacent Cambridge Airport in the six years to 2015. The Hobart tower handles both airports.

The report did recommend continued redesign of flight routes in and out of Hobart and did occur.

MTF...P2