Maintaining Safety Standards on Tail and Crosswind Limits
The alteration of aviation safety standards and flight paths have become popular considerations for many in the community to alleviate their frustrations with aircraft noise. Unfortunately, Airservices have been adding and fuelling these initiatives by ignoring regulatory decrees and their legislated primary responsibilities.
For Brisbane airport flight operations, there is still a politically based push to increase Tailwind limits above that in the ICAO standards to appease the “noise” complaints.
CASA has already reviewed the proposal and has reiterated that they are firm on keeping the 5kt international standard at BNE. However, Airservices are still advocating for increasing the limits in spite of the regulatory ruling.
The Senate Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport References Committee has recently responded to community noise concerns by opening a new inquiry into the
Impact and mitigation of aircraft noise (Senate Inquiry). The AFAP has advocated against many initiatives that prioritise noise appeasement over aviation standards and safety. This inquiry is again an opportunity to state the safety reasons and is open for submissions from the general public, aviation industry stakeholders and AFAP pilot members.
We have advocated that Airservices should not be the government agency responsible for this issue and an extract from our
Green and White Paper submission on this topic reads:
“...whilst the responsibility of aircraft noise remains with Airservices Australia, they will continue to compromise on their legislated primary responsibility of the safety of air navigation. Airservices has become politically risk adverse to the point that it persistently pushes for degradations to international aviation safety standards to appease noise complainants and relieve itself of public scrutiny.
The Government should develop policies to relieve Airservices of all aircraft noise related responsibilities and assign the responsibility to another agency, relieving the divided priorities of two inconsolable ends, noise and safety.”
These positions, and others drawn from our other advocacy related to these issues, will form the basis of our submission to this inquiry, due by April 5, 2024.