There were limited opportunities for Angel Flight to be made aware of any safety related information involving flights conducted on its behalf.
The combination of the requirement implemented by Angel Flight Australia for pilots to report safety occurrences to the organisation in addition to normal ATSB reporting requirements, and the ongoing introduction of community service flight activity type in BITRE activity and ATSB occurrence databases, will increase the availability of safety information in the community service flight sector.
Safety action taken: Angel Flight Australia advised the ATSB that pilots are now required to submit a report to Angel Flight within 24 hours, in addition to any regulatory reporting requirements, notifying them of any occurrence, incident or accident on any sector.
ATSB comment: The ATSB acknowledges that Angel Flight has implemented a requirement to report incidents and accidents. The ATSB encourages Angel Flight to support pilots to report through a just culture approach and develop a system to systematically capture safety information received to enable it to assess ongoing safety.
Safety action taken: The ATSB is in the process of introducing aviation activity types for safety occurrence reporting, recording and analysis. Activity types will supplement the current (regulatory-based) operation types, and will align safety occurrences with the way the Bureau of Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Economics (BITRE) has been collecting general aviation flights and hours flown since 2014, based on ICAO recommended practices.
As one of the BITRE activity types is ‘community service flights’, this activity will be able to be recorded for future safety occurrences (in addition to a private operation type). Where this information is provided to the ATSB at the time of the notification, this will allow the ATSB and CASA, and the public via the ATSB public occurrence database, to analyse future safety occurrences and trends for this type of activity.
