Singapore Air, Qantas flights sent on merging paths near Perth last Thursday
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Australia’s air traffic control lottery has rolled the dice again, sending a Singapore Airlines 777 and a Qantaslink 717 on merging paths north of Perth last Thursday.
Darth Briji, a Melbourne spotter, posted this photo of the Singapore 777 involved in the incident on the web
Australia’s air traffic control system last Thursday let a Singapore Airlines Boeing 777-300ER with 278 seats fly on a collision course with a Qantaslink Boeing 717 (mostly configured with 115 seats at present) some 303 kilometres north of Perth until urgent action was taken to keep them apart.
Both airliners had been assigned a flight level of 35,000 feet.
The continued occurrence of such loss of safe separation incidents has lead to a special on going CASA audit of AirServices Australia. Recent incidents have included Airservices losing a Virgin Australia 737-800 for most of its flight between Sydney and Brisbane, and lying about the incident afterwards, as well as losing an Etihad Airways A340 for hours while it flew across the inland.
This is what the ATSB says about the investigation it has launched.
Two aircraft, both maintaining flight level 350, were on converging tracks with the same estimate for overhead Morawa NDB, Western Australia. A controller noticed the potential conflict and alerted the sector controllers managing the flights, who acted to resolve the situation. There was a loss of separation assurance.
The brief words from the ATSB are worth careful consideration. It indicates that sector controllers were unaware of the error. One of the critical questions is what lead to these two jets being given the same altitude and crossing courses?
The Virgin Australia and Etihad incidents are among a string of dangerous failures at AirServices Australia that have demonstrated its inability to reliably keep track of and separate aircraft, as well as tell the truth and candidly report its failures to the air safety investigator.
In another incident on 17 October a Qantas Boeing 737-800 near Canberra dropped below the designated safe minimum altitude for its position. The jet was 46 kilometres from the airport, where the flight paths and altitude minimums are set to avoid some of the highest terrain in the country.
This is what the ATSB says about this investigation.
The aircraft descended below the assigned altitude and ATC received a minimum safe altitude warning.
Again the wording, although brief, is laden with meaning, and an unanswered question, which is what caused a Qantas crew to disobey, or overlook, the safe minimum altitude in what is airspace shared with some very clearly identified big hills?
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Ben,
You are absolutely right to report these continuous breaches – these are just the ones that make it to the public arena via ATSB that you get to see. The open reporting culture that existed just a few years ago has been greatly diminished by subtle pressure through to outright overt bullying and intimidation against individual controllers and indeed against their own ATC line managers to ‘manage’ and ‘counsel’ any ‘minor’ breaches ‘in-house’. I think your previous article about the inhibiting of the VOZ aircraft from SYD to BNE showed some indication of that. This is a sign of a couple of things: 1/ how worried senior management possibly are about the truth of how deep the organisation is in the mire, and their desire to keep it out of the press, and therefore out of the eyes and ears of the Minister, and 2/ how operational KPI’s are linked to the toxic structure that is ‘at risk’ salary components – or in straight language: bonuses.
Senior management or corporate affairs people who may read such claims will counter this as false, and tell you of their robust procedures and policies, anti-bullying policies, open reporting culture etc. etc. It is all just convenient manufactured ‘cover’ to be trotted out whenever an independent journalist like yourself, or and independent senator has the temerity to ask tough questions.
Ask the remaining operational people who have experience (a dwindling group), and most will tell you the chickens are coming home to roost, that the current ATC staff demographics and total resourcing has reached a point of ‘un-recoverable’. And they are not kidding. Sydney ATC is currently frantically trying to recruit internally experienced controllers to cover their soon to be retired workforce. This means grabbing them from other units who are already below minimum safe staffing levels – but they will be transferred to Sydney for one reason alone: politics. You see Sydney gets attention when it goes wrong. And Minister Albanese does not like attention. He is getting far too much of it for the wrong reasons at the moment with CASA and ATSB. Now does anyone seriously think Airservices Australia is immune to the types of things we are seeing in Senate estimates with CASA and ATSB? Airservices are still engaged in a deeply flawed project to reduce the number of sectors that control air traffic in Australia, at a time when their own internal safety reviews, from their own internal safety specialists are telling them they are at high risk by NOT opening IMMEDIATELY, additional sectors to manage the huge increase in air traffic over the past five years. But they are effectively ignoring it. They are ‘rolling the dice’ as you put it. It is in a way understandable. Many of the senior managers come from outside of the organisation with little operational knowledge. Many will only stay three years or so. They can afford to take a three year ‘risk’ and then bail out to the next organisation. The operational staff however are there for 10, 15 , 20+ years. They will bear witness or involvement when the dice comes up snake eyes. So who is really carrying the risk? Apart from the travelling public!
Personally I spent nearly 40 years in Air Traffic Control in all its phases including Quality Control, and Air Traffic Accident investigation. I am currently retired, but available for consulting work in this regard, and specifically to this problem; if certain authorities would be interested in solutions to the problem. Please contact me at golson33@comcast.net.
Hi Ben,
You are making a lot of bold statements in your blog posts. Would you mind sharing what qualifications or exposure to air traffic control you have to be an expert in the area?
JC,
Follows the links I have just added to the story. These are serious incidents way beyond the parameters for normal in a developed Level One country in terms of FAA ratings. They are lied about by management, and its attempts to withhold full and truthful disclosure render it liable for criminal prosecution under the Transport Safety Information Act of 2003.
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