[Peetwo]

Aviation Safety non-partisan?- You bet..  

Signs of the times.

Nicely done Ventus and to the point.  The next big question is ‘why’ have the Senators been unable to get anything changed; both the Fawcett (AWOL) and Xenophon rhetoric should have sent minions scurrying to mend the fences, put the minister on high alert and produced almost immediate results.  Phhuuttt, the balloon collapses, which is a bad enough thing, but since then, things have only become worse.

Look at the latest series of ATSB reports, see any signs of improvement?  Beggared if I do.  What I can discern is a milk and water approach to meat and potato matters.  The recent (in ATSB time scale) events at Melbourne, serious matters in need of ‘deep’ analysis and demanding change.  Did we get anything we paid for; No.  Anything remotely useful; No.  Do we still have to endure Dolan at estimates; Yes.  Can the ATSB troops still do useful reports; Yes; so why are they not?   Since the Pel-Air inquiry no change – pointless exercise?  You bet.

Look over the way into the CASA HQ any major changes there?  McComic departed the fix, but that was a natural event; Terry buggered off before he dropped off the twig, no great surprise there; then eventually we got Skidmore-Twist.  A confused, confounded, captured boy brought in to do a mans job; better men left out of the race and then the great nothing.  Unless you count endless hours spent reconfirming the Forsyth report – remember that?; shelf-ware now, just a view says the master of hot air, gab, party line and sod all else.  More time and more effort achieving SFA.  I will avoid the Skidmore selection of crew, conflict with the board and capture by the establishment.   Avmed remains a total nightmare, time will come when Pooh-Shambollic will be revered as a ‘reformer’; wait and see.  

You can always have a look at the ASA performance, but take your bucket (to vomit in) and your spade (to dig your way out of the mud).  Argh, can’t be bothered even rehashing; at least Staib and Clark departed the fix, which, in anyone’s jungle cannot be a bad thing.

The only positive things to emerge are absolute, categorical proof that the Senate ‘Wet Lettuce Leaf’ exists, and that sound and fury signify Nada.  Gods alone know how much all this wheel spinning has cost the industry and taxpayer; but it is clear how we shall pay for it, with a defunct, derelict industry and in blood and smoking body parts, that’s how.  But no matter, no one will be responsible.  Now that is a fine result, don’t you think?

There is a line which when crossed takes you from being part of the solution to being a part of the problem.  Is there a problem? – you bet.  Can the Senate resolve it?; seems more unlikely as the years roll by.  

Selah.

In November 2008 Albo said in his..Address at opening of CASA’s New Brisbane Office:

"..And, nothing, I repeat nothing, is as important in aviation as safety.."

And more recently we had this on Albo's blinkered, biased 19th century view on Aviation Safety: 

This was in reply to the Truss response to the Forsyth review report & recommendations:

Maybe Albo has had the last laugh because the Forsyth review has now come to nought and his leader Bill Shorten has a similar blinkered, uninformed view that aviation safety only involves Qantas & possibly Virgin??

However that doesn't mean these sorts of issues will not come home to roost for Labor & the Coalition come Election time..

Courtesy Planetalking:

Labor’s sorry record on air safety will bite it over Qantas

Ben Sandilands | Mar 06, 2014 8:48PM |


Inside a Qantas hangar: Qantas supplied photo

Someone should have warned Opposition leader Bill Shorten against playing the Qantas safety card today in Parliamentary Question Time because of the dismal record of his shadow transport spokesperson Anthony Albanese as a former Transport Minister with responsibility for CASA and the ATSB.

Shorten urged the view that the Qantas safety record would be at risk if it was sold to overseas interests if the Coalition succeeded in repealing the foreign ownership restrictions on Qantas shares.

This argument is almost totally without merit, given that Qantas has for a long time had much such work done abroad, although there is evidence that at times Qantas also failed to supervise such work adequately and may on one or more occasions not chosen its maintenance provider wisely, a risk that also applies to sub standard work done in this country.

Not all maintenance repair and overhaul outfits are grade A, here or abroad, and until aircraft became more reliable and their engineering support needs began to fall, Qantas had shrewdly kept as much of this work as possible under its control in Australia.

The law in relation to the responsibilities carried by Qantas and any other Australian airline, whether international or domestic, is blind to borders. No matter where the work is done Qantas senior managers and the board are personally liable for safety standards and outcomes.

It’s a condition of Qantas or its competitors keeping their AOCs.

Which raises the problem of Anthony Albanese as the Minister  responsible for CASA, the safety regulator, and the ATSB, the supposedly independent safety investigator. Albanese is an embarrassment in relation to the on going scandal of the Pel-Air crash investigation, in which he failed to respond, as he had promised, to the detective work done by a Senate committee which found that CASA had withheld from the ATSB an internal document showing it had been so deficient in its oversight of the operator that a preventable accident had occurred.

It further found evidence that implied that the ATSB had complied with pressure from CASA to frame the pilot of the crashed jet with all the responsibility, and failed to consider all of the safety factors, nor even report on them in the form and detail required under international ICAO rules.

The entire Pel-Air scandal shows that CASA was not just incompetent but quite possibly in breach of Commonwealth law in suppressing information relevant to an air crash investigation.

If Shorten is the slightest bit serious about air safety he should acquaint himself with Albanese’s pathetic record in relation to Pel-Air.

The scandal is also a test for the Coalition’s deputy PM and Transport Minister, Warren Truss, who is understood to be making a response to the Senate committee findings before the current parliamentary session ends later this month.

Ominously, Truss has allowed his own initiative, the Aviation Safety Regulation Review, which is now underway, to suppress public submissions which are highly critical of  CASA by not publishing them at a single accessible reference point.

While this is in train, the ATSB has commissioned an external international review by Canadian safety officials of its investigative procedures which doesn’t give that panel authority to do anymore than review the ‘documents’ related to the Pel-Air inquiry, rather than seek information directly from the the pilots and passengers who were on board that jet and survived a ditching in the sea at night near Norfolk Island in 2009.

There is a great deal that remains, to be frank, rotten and secretive in the public administration of air safety in this country, and Shorten blundered into an area where it could be that even the Coalition may not have the guts to go.

There are 47 stories on Pel-Air tagged here on Plane Talking.

..&

Sketchy Pel-Air crash investigation raises uncomfortable questions for deputy PM

Ben Sandilands | Jan 22, 2015 12:41PM |

There’s plenty to worry about when it comes to crash investigation in Australia’s aviation industry — not that you’d know it from the minister’s interest in the subject.

How long can Warren Truss, the deputy PM, leader of the Nationals, and minister responsible for reannouncing Labor highway projects as well as air safety, continue to neglect the aviation part of his portfolio?

Questions about the minister’s capacity to focus and act are made all the more pressing by the extraordinary generosity to political parties by Regional Express Airlines (REX), the owners of the disgraced Pel-Air operation that dropped an air ambulance into the sea near Norfolk Island in 2009. REX’s board include the former Nationals transport minister John Sharp, who is deputy chair of REX and chair of Pel-Air.

In 2012, Australia’s air safety investigator, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, was in a state of internal turmoil over the direction of its final report in the Pel-Air crash. That turmoil is documented in the peer review of the ATSB’s report by the Transportation Safety Board of Canada, which led to Truss instructing the ATSB in December to reopen that  inquiry.

Consider what was happening in 2012 carefully.

At the end of August 2012 the ATSB produced its final crash report, which failed to mention dozens of  serious deficiencies in the Pel-Air’s Westwind corporate jet division, and overlooked its own failure — as the regulator — to oversee Pel-Air, including serious problems with the airline’s fatigue management and oceanic refueling practices.

However, documents the Australian Electoral Commission recently provided to Karen Casey, the nurse who was seriously injured in the Pel-Air ditching, show that  in the second half of 2012, REX donated $250,000 to Labor, $97,500 to the Nationals and $40,000 to the Liberals.

If REX knows the rationale behind the donations, it isn’t sharing it with the media.

The obvious deficiencies in the ATSB report led in turn to a damning all-party Senate committee inquiry, which, among other things, expressed a lack of confidence in the testimony provided to it by the chief commissioner of the ATSB, Martin Dolan.

Both the former Labor minister responsible for transport, Anthony Albanese, and the current missing-in-action minister, Warren Truss, treated the senators with total contempt, refusing to engage in any meaningful way with their concerns, and in the case of Truss, relying on an anodyne nothing-to-see-here response from his own department.

But after Truss ordered the reopening of the Pel-Air inquiry — something he had to do given the incisive criticism of the ATSB by the board’s Canadian counterparts — the ATSB defied him by continuing to display its discredited Pel-Air report on its website.

Worse than that, Truss appears to have drifted off into la-la land by allowing the ATSB to appoint one of its own, Dr Michael Walker, to lead the investigation into its own fiercely denied errors.

The perils of this shabby approach would be obvious to someone who is on the ball.

The minister has also failed to carry out his personal commitment to appoint an additional commissioner with technical aviation experience to the ATSB, or to act on the Senate’s findings against the conduct and integrity of its chief commissioner.

A vague minister and an embarrassing and deeply flawed air accident report. What could possibly go wrong for Australia’s reputation in air safety governance with a combination like this?

MTF..you bet 

Ps In the meantime refer here for some IOS BRB suggested election promo pics.. - The Mandarin

Pps And Albo don't worry mate we've plenty of you pumping the flesh & running away from Channel 7 reporters in the wake of your non-action with the PelAir report.

Fawcett highlights government failure on aviation safety recommendations

August 4, 2013 by australianaviation.com.au

Senator Fawcett - alarmed by government apathy on aviation safety.

Liberal Senator for South Australia David Fawcett has condemned the federal minister responsible for aviation for “failing to respond to the damning findings of the Senate Inquiry into the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) which was released on 23 May 2013.”
“Even the announcement of an external review of the ATSB by the Canadian Transportation Safety Board (TSB) was not made by the Minister but by the agency in question,” Fawcett added.
“This raises serious concerns about the efficacy of any resulting report unless the Minister ensures that the terms of reference and Australian management of the audit are transparent and independent.”
Senator Fawcett, who chaired the Senate inquiry into aviation accident investigations and is a former Army test pilot, told Australian Aviation in July: “The government is not allowed to simply ignore the report and its 26 recommendations.”
Fawcett called on Minister Albanese to ensure the review of the ATSB has the confidence of the aviation industry and the public by adopting Recommendation 8 of the Senate report.
The Senate recommended that “an expert aviation safety panel be established to ensure quality control of ATSB investigation and reporting processes along the lines set out by the committee.”
“While the engagement of the Canadian TSB is welcome, the gravity of the issues raised in the Senate report means that the Minister should be overseeing the review with the support of an expert panel rather than the ATSB,” Fawcett said.
“It is critical that this review of the ATSB is allowed to examine all sensitive areas of the ATSB investigation processes as identified in the Senate report including the Canley Vale accident”