AUSTRALIAN AGRICULTURAL OPERATOR Dan Kennedy, recently returned from a Churchill Fellowship world study on GA safety, believes that insurance payouts of up to A$1 million ($806,500) on turbine agricultural aircraft, more than 60 of which are operated in Australia, may price his industry out of business if accident trends cannot be reversed. Kennedy believes that human-factors (HF) considerations are largely ignored in agricultural aviation.
"The future of agricultural aviation, given the dangerous nature of the work, will be driven by insurance premiums. Insurers can play a more active role and provide the incentives to employ sound maintenance practices and quality pilots. A good operator should be rewarded with lower premiums or some type of rebate and in turn the number of claims will drop," says Kennedy, who recommends that:
the training syllabus should include comprehensive agricultural-pilot training, including the use of simulators. The same would apply to turbine endorsements. Training must be a continual process, not a one-off event;
an HF investigative model should be used for major accidents. Ideally, insurance companies should fund an independent investigator for the industry Australia-wide, given that the Bureau of Air Safety Investigation and the CASA do not seem to have the resources to do this;
single-pilot crew resource management should be implemented by all operators, as part of a programme starting from early training to instill a safety culture;
a move towards larger, more reliable, equipment would enable operators to do more with less, and in greater safety. Insurance incentives for high-reliability equipment would be a useful motivator.
Source: Flight International
