A long overdue set of revised safety laws for aviation in general in Australia, released for comment by the end of the month by CASA, have some comical provisions.
These include going supersonic while flying under visual flight rules (VFR) 50 Commonwealth penalty units (or $5500). Imagine your average Cessna 172 owner terrified at the thought of accidentally flying as fast as Concorde.
Or failing to see and avoid a collision with another aircraft, the same $5500, except that you will be dead, so they’ll never collect.
Or taking a loaded gun onto a flight ($2250) or “discharging it without pilot permission” ($5500), which seems like a plea bargain if ever, considering the near certainty of being jailed for 20 years for doing either.
Or if you are a pilot, picking up and setting down passengers while in flight.
Never mind the penalty. Jetstar will probably pay you tens of millions of dollars for working out how to do that.
Don’t laugh. This is serious. Australian taxpayers have spent something like 19 years and $150 million on efforts to pull together the essential safety requirements of flight under what is called Part 91 regulations, so the drafting inanities don’t do justice to what is an extremely important regulatory reconstruction of the rules.
While the new rules are the foundations of a critical reform of safety rules in this country, and largely will take immediate effect on general aviation, private owners and small third-tier carriers or charter operations, CASA describes them as setting out the “rules of the road” and emphasises that all pilots, no matter what they fly, are bound by them.
Which is good to know. You don’t want your friendly captain flying between Melbourne and Sydney to make up time by nudging the Boeing or Airbus past the speed of sound and have odd engine and sections of the wings ripped off while you are trying to work out what exactly is contained in food just put in front of you.
There are some severe real problems with the proposed rules too. One that caused caustic comments from several airline and aviation figures who are reviewing the document concerns penalties for making an emergency or distress call that proves to have been unnecessary.
“This is dangerous,” one consultant said. “International practice is that pilots must immediately report their concerns, not hesitate and ask themselves, will I be fined if I’m wrong.
“It is astonishing that someone as skilled as a pilot as the new CASA CEO (John McCormick) would even consider the inclusion of such a rule and a $5500 fine.”
But maybe McCormick didn’t read that part. CASA is engaged in extremes of delegation at the moment as it tries to break the regulatory impasse that has bedeviled it for decades.
There are a lot of things that need to be sorted out before these rules finally come into effect.
I flew into Bathurst a few years ago, and followed the rules for a VFR airport (no control tower). On the radio as I was in the circuit about to turn onto final, was a Rex pilot who decided to make up his own rule and land behind me, without doing a circuit (save time no doubt).
I told him I will pull off onto the cross strip. Well you wont believe it. He was on the runway behind me and we missed by metres as he was faster.
The following day a courier plane from Orange did the same thing.
Then you get the Indian trainee pilots coming from Bankstown, and you simply cannot understand them on the radio.
Too many cowboys, where are the fines we really need to protect the public.
“Or if you are a pilot, picking up and setting down passengers while in flight.”
Oil exploration / services company helicopters do this all the time in Europe to avoid landing fees. Hover a foot off the deck and the passengers jump out or scramble in. After all margins are thin.
“Or if you are a pilot, picking up and setting down passengers while in flight.
Never mind the penalty. Jetstar will probably pay you tens of millions of dollars for working out how to do that.”
Your articles don’t tend to prompt laughter, Ben, but this is a gem.
For the record is possible to undertake the “picking up and setting down passengers while in flight.”
My colleagues and I did this on a number of occasions when flying high wing Auster aircraft without a door when dropping off passengers on the Cox’s Bight beach in the inaccessible South West of Tasmania. We regularly took the doors off from the Auster aircraft that stalled at around 20 Knots to drop food to bush walkers and equipment to surveyors in the 1950’s. There was usually a 30 knot sea breeze across the beach so we did not stop flying when we side slipped and clawed into the wind dropping one windward wheel on the beach to allow our passengers to alight. I think I can recall even picking passengers and their packs by this method that required them to approach us sideways as we hovered beside them with the windward wheel lifting off the ground in gusts while we jockeyed the throttle to keep it in contact.
Article: Humourous jabs at safety regulations which seem to make no sense.
Comments: Well explained reasons why those “silly” rules exist.