Airservices Australia may not be able to keep enough staff to safely separate air traffic, but was quick off the mark to censor its new live flight tracking service the moment two light aircraft collided over Casula in SW Sydney yesterday killing two pilots in one of them.
The two people in the other aircraft were able to safely land at Bankstown Airport, which both aircraft were flying towards when they merged on the tracking screen.
AirServices was not responsible for keeping these aircraft apart while they were flying in the air space that is shared by many light aircraft on a normal day.
The censorship was tracked on the blog zhasper 2.0:
Airservices did not explain why the tracking service was censored although the actual moment when the two aircraft touched has also been archived on the Sydney Morning Herald‘s somewhat irritating revolving drawer of news videos.
ASA has a very adversarial attitude, us against them, in every sense. They seem especially sensitive about complaints from residents that suffer the trauma caused by their routing of air traffic over residential areas. Adelaide residents are unhappy with them routing jet traffic over areas formally quiet. In Queensland a very controversial Chinese owned flight training school, just like the ones involved in the latest accident, has been knocked back in Hervey Bay and the very well organised aviation community has been after blood as a result. I believe the ASA is funded by the aircraft industry. It certainly acts like it. When it hits the fan they will close ranks against “us”. A local web site covers this… http://www.stop-noise.org
After years of CASA and ASA rubbing up to the airline industry and GA, they no longer act as a regulatory body but more like a private club with lawyers guarding the door. No other developed country allows air craft to do what we allow here. There is a reason so many of the ‘students’ are foreign
Thanks for the link to my blog, but it’s broken. You’re missing a “http://” from the start of the URL, so the browser prepends http://crikey.com.au/Politics/, leading to completely the wrong place.
Incidentally, I come from Marybourough (~30 minutes drive from H. Bay, and now all part of the Fraser Coast under the latest round of council amalgamations up there). I was up there at the end of November for a few days and heard a lot about the flight school. At least according to local scuttlebutt, the chief reason for canning it was the feeling that it would be “unsafe” to have it at HB airport, which receives about 12 commercial flights a day. The almost entirely unused Maryborough airport was (again, according to local scuttlebutt) not even considered – even though it’s just had a big ASA “Don’t come near this fence or we’ll shoot you” fence and signage installed.
And they also removed all the air traffic audio from the internet of the crash in Melbourne near Moorabbin earlier this year!