By Michael Gilmour 

Let’s face it, flying is inherently dangerous. Yes, I know all the statistics that it’s safer to fly than it is to cross the road but say that to a pilot who is locked in a spiral dive from 7,000 feet and my guess is that he’ll brave a dual carriage-way every time.

The basic problem is that flying is an unstable activity where most GA pilots rely upon 1950s engine technology to pull us into the air while getting down could be best classified as a controlled crash. Until some white-coated boffin using the latest in supercomputing (or Windows 7 as Bill Gates would have us believe) invents an anti-gravity machine, pilots will continue to balance air pressure versus Newton’s gravitational laws.

I’ve said it a million times before but pilots have the most amazing fun in one of the most unforgiving of environments. So that we can continue to enjoy our pursuit of the ultimate pleasure of flight we need to ensure that everything is safe. The question I have is whether it’s actually worth it? Paying for all that safety...we all know that flying is worth it!

There have been endless numbers of jokes that the safest aircraft is one that doesn’t fly. In fact, many would argue that this is the goal of CASA for General Aviation. The esteemed government body could then claim in some fancy Powerpoint presentation with 3D graphs and pretty pictures that they have finally attained a 100% safety record for GA. The fact that no one is flying could be conveniently glossed over.

If we take a step back from this extreme safety position then what we are accepting is that there are some varying degrees of risk. As soon as you pose the risk question then you are also accepting that some planes will crash and some will never fly.

A couple of years ago I had the opportunity to go to Kill Devil Hill in North Carolina where the Wright brothers experimented and made their first flights. They had a life size model of the plane that they used and let me assure you that it would never pass a modern pre-flight. I could imagine that the pre-flight checks would’ve involved, “little bits of cloth stuck on with glue?”, followed by “check”.

If Wilbur and Orville didn’t take the risk and make those first flights then it’s likely that we’d all be riding faster Wright Brothers bicycles rather than soaring through the air. Innovation is often necessarily risky and less safe than something that is tried and proven.

In many instances the almost manic focus on safety stifles invention and dramatically increases the costs to often prohibitive levels. Sadly, like many other Australian industries I’m sure that the aviation industry has experienced the impact of inventors moving offshore to places where the entrepreneurial spirit of innovation is alive and well.

The flip-side is to allow anyone in anything to get into the air and do whatever they like. Using a very Darwinian approach any inventors that survive have probably come up with a reasonable idea that should be investigated further. This is potentially time saving and this cost cutting approach could have a special appeal to governments that have spent extraordinary amounts of money bailing out their various economies.

Additionally, venture capitalists could quickly determine their risk by seeing if they were investing in a completely whole human being or one missing a few bits. An elderly inventor with at least partial limb functionality would pose less risk compared to a young one with fully functional arms and legs. The strange thing would be that a corpse would pose no risk at all.

So when it comes to innovation, safety is about degrees and managing both personal risk and financial cost. The fact that many of us place our lives in the rumble of a 1950s designed engine would suggest that innovation has not really continued to move forward for the majority of light aircraft in Australia.

The other problem with safety is the cost of reaching a perfect safety record while still allowing people to fly. Aircraft parts are incredibly expensive and if you endeavour to find out why then you’re often given the excuse of safety and that each aircraft part is tracked.

The excuse of high prices being partially due to tracking parts is, in my humble opinion, complete nonsense. This may have been a significant cost in the past but with modern database driven systems costing a fraction of what they used to, the cost of tracking a parts history should disappear as a non-issue.

So it looks more like safety is the culprit for inflated pricing. Let’s take a look at a rough comparison between aircraft and car engines. Depending upon the aircraft type you would be lucky to get away with replacing an engine for less than $60,000. When you consider that you could purchase nearly four brand new Mazda 2 hatchbacks or two Mazda 6 sedans for the same price then we need to really question whether the aircraft owner is getting their money’s worth.

Let’s take this a few steps further. The modern car engine is stuffed full of electronics and computers that continuously monitor every tiny little thing that the engine does. In some cars you can even change engine performance depending upon whether you are feeling sporty or not.

I don’t know very much about the mechanics of engines but I do know that the last time I drove eight hours from Melbourne to Adelaide at about 110kms/hour my car worked fine. In fact, it even made the return journey plus continued to function admirably until the next service a few months later. Out of all of the millions of cars on the road when was the last time you saw one broken down or, if you have just recently experienced this rare event, how about the one before that? It just really doesn’t happen enough for most of us to worry that much about. If it did then we’d allow a few hours to drive the kids to school each day just in case the engine decided to give up. You may have guessed that I don’t really buy into the argument that aircraft engines are necessarily more reliable than a modern car engine.

From a cost perspective you can purchase a decent car engine for a couple of grand which would mean that we could replace an aircraft engine with a car engine every three months for almost eight years and we’d still be in front financially. My guess is that the average private aircraft does about 100 hours per year so this would mean you could replace an aircraft engine

every 25 hours with a brand new car engine for the same cost! This illustrates just how insane aircraft engines are priced!

I know that testing and compliance costs are incredibly expensive but with engines that were built on the same technology as that used in the 1950s this argument just doesn’t stack up. As I’ve already stated I’m not an aircraft engineer but it would seem to me that the costs incurred in 1950 for an engine to be approved would be well and truly amortized by now.

In fact, since I would go as far as to say that I’m just a simple private pilot so I’m not entirely sure why a new plane costs so much. What I do know is that the current price of new aircraft has placed aircraft ownership beyond the reach of the great majority of Australians. The Jetsons’ cartoon show depicting every family with an ‘air car’ will continue to be a pipe-dream.

So what are the results of this obsession with safety which is driving up prices? According to the 1998-2007 Australian Aviation Safety in Review report released by the ATSB in June this year the average age of GA aircraft has risen from 20 years in 1993 to 28 years in 2007. Remember that’s the average which means 50% of the current planes are older than 28 years!

To place this context let’s imagine driving down the road and only seeing cars that are 28 years old. My wife’s old brown 1980 Toyota Corona would be looking pretty good and my 1969 Mazda 1200 with the rusted out floor would be more than acceptable. Clearly there are economic drivers at work that have retarded the industry wide investment into new GA aircraft.

So has the aircraft industry effectively been forced to spend huge sums of money on getting that last 0.001% safety margin from an ageing aircraft fleet? Of the total accidents reported in 2007 (both fatal and non-fatal), 11.3% were directly related to mechanical issues. The question needs to be asked as to whether an incentive to purchase new GA aircraft would actually reduce this figure or whether it’s better to institute more rigid maintenance regimes at a greater cost. It could be argued that over the period of the ATSB report, as the ageing RPT fleet was renewed with fresh investment, that the number of mechanical accidents declined.

So has the aviation world gone safety mad? I think it has. Ultimately what is happening is that private pilots are voting with their feet by not being able to fund their passion. Back in 1998 there were just under 18,000 PPL and SPECPL licenses and in 2007 there were just over 13,000. That’s a decline of roughly 38%. I just hope that a number have made it across to recreational aviation.

The biggest factor impacting safety is not from driving out the last tiny increase in safety from ‘widget number 21’ but from pilot experience. Generally speaking the more experienced a pilot the less likely they are going to crash. If the cost of hiring, maintaining and buying GA aircraft is prohibitive then the number of hours flown per year per pilot will logically decrease.

It’s ironic that the biggest gains in safety can be found by getting pilots to fly more. At the moment there seems to be an industry and policy wide disconnect between cost, hours and safety. Just ask yourself the question, “If it cost half as much to fly would you fly more?” If you’re like me I can already guess the answer.

As I stated earlier, we have incredible fun in the most unforgiving of environments. Anything that is in our control we need to continually polish; from flight planning to pre-flight checks, communication and aviation skills. We have an obligation to ourselves and our passengers that our skills aren’t just current but come from an attitude of dissatisfaction with our current level of abilities. I believe that for the benefit of all Australians it’s the obligation of policy makers and the broader industry to ensure that the aspiration of flying is affordable for the safety of us all.