Editorial: On the job at hand

OPINION: When we sent a reporter up on his debut gliding flight in 2001 he noticed, on the outside of the windscreen directly in front of him, a wee bit of string flittering in the wind.

Pleasingly, it turned out that for all the instrumentation available inside the cockpit, the external string, just a few centimetres long, was attached to give the pilot a pretty fair indication of many of the things he needed to know, as it moved to the left, to the right, or straight up.

This lessened the need to keep peering down at the control panel. Good pilots, he was told, try "to keep their head out of the office".

At last, the reporter wrote, a situation in which they actually encourage you to have your head in the clouds.

Pilot distraction is in the news because the Civil Aviation Authority is looking at the use of cellphones, and texting. This after the sad case of Morgan Saxton, who died in 2008 when his helicopter crashed into Lake Wanaka.

Before it hit the water, his helicopter had a "mast bump" affecting the rotor, but records also show the pilot had been sending and receiving text messages. Had he been preoccupied with this he would have had less time toreact.

Quite understandably, much is being made of the contrast between existing driving and flight rules. It is illegal to text and drive, but not to text and fly. CAA is looking into whether new rules are needed.

First up, the questions are whether there really is a problem here, and whether it is one that is best addressed by legislation, or education.

Down there on the roads, it was only after the abject failure of public education campaigns that the authorities took the more formal route of introducing laws and penalties.

Murmurings have already arisen against any rushing to assume the situations are the same. There has hardly been the level of carnage with aircraft that there has been with road transport.

Some say there's not the same risk of collision as there are on busy roads and that to get a pilot's licence you already have to show you can fly and use the radio to communicate with other pilots or air traffic control, not to mention the cockpit duties such as consulting maps, writing logs and changing radio frequencies.

However, the acceptability of risk in the air should be calibrated against factors more relevant than what's happening on the ground (unless, of course, what's happening on the ground is that alarmed people are shouting that an aircraft is screaming down towards them).

There's nothing wrong with authorities being pre-emptive, especially if it can save lives.

Cellphones are another stamp of distraction, and not just from texting. In 2007 topdressing pilot Andrew Wilde crashed while talking on a cellphone.

A friend later said he had often made the cellphone calls to help him stay alert. Just months before the crash he had been warned not to use a cellphone while flying at a low level, after he hit a sheep while taking off at the same time as talking on a cellphone.

As things stand, it is debatable whether a new rule is required, or for that matter would be enforceable.

However, it is a debate worth having.

- © Fairfax NZ News

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