SPORTPILOT
RAAus Safety –
WHERE ARE WE NOW?
CODY CALDER Innovation and Improvement Cody has been with RAAus for 2 ½ years as Innovation and Improvement Executive. He holds a Postgraduate Certificate in Transport Safety Investigation, Diploma in Aviation, Diploma in Business, Commercial Pilot Licence and a Multi-engine instrument rating. Cody is passionate about all aspects of aviation, with experience in skydiving and charter operations (Fiji/NZ), gliding, aerobatics and warbirds. cody.calder@raaus.com.au
The past 18 months have certainly presented their fair share of challenges to the aviation community. Then, just as we started to believe we were returning to a new sense of normality, the Delta variant of COVID-19 left us with longer lockdowns than previously experienced, across much of the country. Despite the many challenges faced by our members, BITRE recently released survey data from RAAus aircraft owners indicated that our community had, in fact, reported an increase in activity across the year of 2020. RAAus operations were calculated to be a total of 166,000 hours, up 16.9% from RAAus generated hours reported in 2019. This data demonstrates that our segment of the industry continues to show positive growth, despite a clear decline in other areas of aviation activity, none more so than commercial air transport, which fell by 50%. For RAAus, the impacts of COVID-19 have once again resulted in us turning our safety focus towards
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informing members of the importance of maintaining currency, and ensuring additional precautions are taken when returning to flight after an extended period of time away. As at the beginning of November we have recently seen the raising of restrictions across New South Wales and Victoria, and with this have seen an increase in the number of occurrences reported to RAAus. For many of these accidents and incidents, lack of currency is determined to be a contributing factor. Alongside loss of control, near miss and engine failure events, returning to flight was one of our top four safety focus areas during National Safety Month in October. During National Safety Month we held a three-day virtual conference where our team and a number of guests gave presentations on these important issues. If you haven’t done so already, I encourage all members to watch some of these sessions on our website, to better understand what more you can do to avoid encountering one of these scenarios. Engine failure, loss of control and near miss events continue to be overrepresented within RAAus
