UK Airprox Board reports

I have been involved in a couple of reported Airproxes, one about three years ago and one recently.

My experience on the first occasion led me to decide for myself and recommend to my students that they do not get involved with the UKAB if they can avoid doing so.

The recent filing is so silly (aircraft who had been given traffic information, in sight of one another, passing at a reasonable distance, on the correct side, in Class G under VMC/VFR) that it further lowers my opinion of the value of the Board.

I have offered, face to face (we attend some meetings together, so I see him from time to time), by telephone and by email to discuss my negative view of the UKAB with the Director, Steve Forward, and he has not taken me up.

It’s a shame, because it could be such a valuable body, but in its current format, my advice is to stay well clear.

The airprox reports are available on the internet. They don’t have names or aircraft registrations, but it’s often not hard to figure out who they are if you’re familiar with the aircraft/area it happened in.

I personally would not report anything to the airprox board, either. It’s a waste of time. There’s really very little new that can be learned, and most of the reports I’ve read are “why the hell did someone report this?” kind, a bit like what Timothy says above. I know someone who was the subject of one too (he wasn’t the reporter) and I have no idea why the reporter bothered – it was silly, the gist of the entire report was almost “OMG there were TWO aircraft in the circuit at once and I lost sight of the one behind me for a few seconds because he made a position report that wasn’t accurate to within 5 meters!” (yes I exaggerate the last bit a little, but it really was silly).

Only about 1/20th of the reports I’ve seen have been worth reading. The volume of the reports seem to be in the order to justify the airprox board’s existence, more than anything really useful. The USA with vastly more GA doesn’t need an airprox board, why do we?

Unfortunately there’s a bit of a culture of over-reporting things in the UK. Some of the stuff I’ve seen in the LAA mag for instance makes me wonder.

I have made two airprox reports in my 12-years of flying. On both occasions I was dismayed by the board’s overriding policy to avoid apportioning blame to either pilot and as a result produced luke-warm analyses that were, in my opinion, no help to the pilot community at large in terms of avoiding similar instances from happening in future. For instance in one incident I thought they should have said something along the lines of ‘If you are departing a rather quiet airfield and hear another pilot announcing that they are inbound from the south-east at 2,200 feet, it would be foolish to immediately depart, unannounced, towards the south-east at exactly 2,200 feet unless you are really rather stupid or fancy risking an airprox or worse’. Instead they issued a luke-warm factual report which read like it was the output of a weakly led committee. I also really dislike the fact that they do not routinely castigate pilots who fly with their transponders deliberately turned off…for instance beneath the London TMA. I read the other day that there are 2 or 3 mid-air collisions in the UK on average each year. We can do better than this!

The reason that the board chooses not to apportion blame is apparently to encourage honest reporting from both pilots ‘so that we can all learn’…However, in my opinion, for so long as there remain people who think that it is ok to fly in busy airspace with their conspicuity devices turned off, and who demonstrate other really dangerous or reckless behaviour, this approach by the board will be seen to be failing.

As to the OP’s question…the results of the board’s investigation are made public, so submissions to them of content and detail may very well leak into their report and into the public domain. I can’t see how this could not be the case.

Howard wrote:

the board’s overriding policy to avoid apportioning blame

Funnily enough, my issue is the opposite.

I was flying (as instructor) a Mooney between City and Southend, and Southend were unable to offer a radar service (I think because they were changing controller, it may have been a lack of radar controllers, I forget), so I continued in IMC towards LAM without radar, in the knowledge that in the history of aviation there has never been a midair collision between civilian aircraft in IMC outside CAS, so it is not a particularly high risk occupation.

However

the Board were nonetheless dumbfounded that, …, he had then carried on outside controlled airspace in IMC without a radar service in what was acknowledged as very busy airspace.

Dumbfounded? Really though? Dumbfounded that I was doing something perfectly legal that has never, ever, in over 100 years resulted in an accident?

I was dumbfounded that their understanding of risk was so poor, given their soi-disant expertise; but more so, I was dumbfounded that they were willing to use such pejorative, insulting and critical language when they claim that they don’t assign blame.

They also assigned considerable blame to the other pilot for flying a VFR mission in IMC, and he, who happens to be a friend (and who, by pure coincidence, I was meeting that very evening for a dinner to say goodbye to the late, lamented Keef Jillings) was equally annoyed by the tone of the report and, as I understand it, neither he nor his employers (a well know AOC) will be co-operating with the UKAB in the future.

A lot of the bigwigs in the GA scene – not just regulatory, but also running the club scene – are a bunch of old farts who see the world from a very military perspective, which is fine but not ideally suited to the civilian world.

Better be careful saying this however, as one might get on somebody’s sh1tlist and not do oneself favours when doing a CAS bust in years to come… it’s a very small world

It’s nice that you provide links for bigwigs and shitlist, but what happened to old fart?

I agree that there are some people in GA who have a military perspective, though I think it is a smaller influence than you say. I am just as concerned at those from a civilian background who think that chinagraph and whizzwheels remain the best way to get around.

But my bugbear (sorry bugbear, but not bugbear) is the number of air-traffickers who really know nothing about GA getting involved, particularly at a regulatory level. That is not to say that some air traffickers are not, themselves, very accomplished pilots, I can think of many of our friends on here who are in just that position, and they make ideal regulators, but there is a core of them who have never got in the front of an aeroplane who are still allowed to make quite fundamental decisions about aviation.

Yes; I think there is a strong thread of ex military + ex ATC in this area. There is no issue with one or the other but when combined they seem to produce certain extremely authoritative personality traits, as evidenced by certain positions within the UK CAA (and its various offshoots / related bodies) and no doubt within every other national CAA. I am told there is a particular path which preserves your service pension while enabling you to control and punish people, which is just the absolutely perfect job, isn’t it?

@Peter, I know who your personal bogeyman is, and I’d like to point out that he is, himself, a pilot. So he is all three, pilot, ATCO and military, which actually puts him in a strong position.

I would also point out that Tony Rapson, until recently the excellent head of the GA Unit and a huge friend of GA, one of its saviours, was a military ATCO, and he could not have been bettered as a regulator.