PRESSRELEASES

LAUNCH OF WWW.PLANECRASHZONE.COM

1)     CASA (Civil Aviation Safety Authority) has a report which concludes that the Moorabbin Airport       poses an Intolerable Societal Risk. CASA says it introduced "mitigators" to deal with the         the risk but word has it most pilots only received a booklet telling them to be more careful.
      Then CASA immediately instucted AirServices to allow even more trainee pilots into the air.

2)      89% of pilots are concerned about the situation which exists

3) Helicopter and plane crashes near schools are an example of the risk, but there are many incidents. Even if there weren’t any incidents, a community of 150,000 people should not be asked to tolerate thousands of trainee flights over their homes. Incidentally there are about 90 schools and educational facilities in the area.

4) The Moorabbin Airport is a discretionary recreational facility for a privileged few and it is heavily subsidised by tax payers. Even though it has double the activity of the Melbourne Airport, the Moorabbin Airport is not actually a transportation hub. The Moorabbin Airport more closely resembles an out of control harley club.

5) There is an unworkable fragmentation of decision making on matters to do with the airport. Basically no-one wants to accept responsibility. The interests of the Community are a last consideration and are first filtered through aviation interest and policy. Community social responsibility and fair play should be properly factored into aviation decisions and airport commerce, especially for a discretionary facility like Moorabbin.

6) The community is stuck in an aviation chess game which panders to the shareholder interests of the Moorabbin Airport Corporation and the Goodman Group. These businesses might do well to take a good hard look at their corporate social responsibility.

7) This is not a fanatical cause it is a request for reasonable safety and amenity – no one is suggesting we ban planes but there is a lot of sky and a lot of sparsely populated places in which to fly - especially for trainee pilots. Planes and helicopters are very mobile. People’s homes, families and children shouldn’t be the ones being asked to move and give up their basic amenity, health and quality of life.

WEBSITE MISSION

The purpose of the website is to communicate 1) the Moorabbin Airport poses an intolerable societal risk and 2) the airport and the activity at the airport unfairly trades on local amenity and quality of life.

For new comers to this issue it is very hard to sort through the jargon and the political spin. It's even harder to pin down the responsible stake holders. When you do find the decision makers they spend most of their time telling you what they are NOT responsible for. These are the same people who tend to relay a lot of well worn myths about the airport – like the impeccable safety record of the facility which of course we have always known was not the case and which fell into a heap with the 2009 Ambidji report. To see the astounding disconnect between bureaucracy and reality, read the March 2010 press release which tells of the Office of Air Traffic Policy wrongly informing a resident that trainee pilots do not fly over homes and families.

Before the existence of this website the first point of call for most people was the Moorabbin Airport Corporation (MAC). Patently not the best place to go for balanced information because MAC is making tens of millions of dollars from the airport. The airport is a profound gravy train for MAC which claims that the facility is not financially viable from an aviation perspective and so has to be propped up by tax payer dollars and or commercial development. In addition the site is being propped up the economics of a whole city and the value of amenity and the quality of life of 150,000 people. The Moorabbin Airport is a private business which has been given authority to undermine the basic property rights of a whole community by imposing ever increasing noise impositions with associated community planning sanctions. At the very least this is unethical at worst it is unconstitutional. As the Airport makes more noise the noise planning overlays spread further over the city and thousands of people lose basic amenity and rights over the properties they have worked so hard to own.

There is much "go away language" associated with the airport issue – so many people have called CASA and been told that it doesn’t deal with noise and amenity issues even though it publishes the fly neighbourly guidelines. Many people have looked at the Air Services Australia Webrak website which is supposed to show aircraft flying over Melbourne but noone points out that three quarters of the Aircraft around Moorabbin Airport don’t turn on their transponders and so don’t appear on Webtrak. Many people have called the Moorabbin Airport about noise and been told that an official and endorsed Noise Exposure Forecast exists for the facility, without being told that that there aren’t any noise measuring devices anywhere near the airport and the official noise exposure forecast simply means MAC has told the Minister it plans to make more noise and the Minister has just rolled over and said OK. . . …And so it goes on. Hence the reason for this website.

This website aims to empower the community and to give it a forum for describing the aviation imposition to which it is being subjected. This site shows the community who should be held accountable for the damage to our community and our quality of life. It is hoped that the site will eventually include substantial information aimed at helping individuals to identify and report specific aviation practices and specific aircraft which are compromising the safety and amenity of our community. At present the latter information is hard to extract because it either does not exist or there is limited cooperation from the holders of the information. The example of many aircraft not using their transponders in the Moorabbin Control Zone is one of a number of examples of lack of transparency and appropriate data.