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1940.Wartime Australia.Key members of Menzies' government die in a fiery plane crash.What went wrong and what happened next?In August 1940 Australia had been at war for almost a year when a Hudson bomber the A16-97 carrying ten people, including three cabinet ministers, crashed into a ridge near Canberra.

In August 1940 Australia had been at war for almost a year when a Hudson bomber – the A16-97 – carrying ten people, including three cabinet ministers, crashed into a ridge near Canberra. In the ghastly inferno that followed the crash, the nation lost its key war leaders. Over the next twelve months, it became clear that the passing of Geoffrey Street, Sir Henry Gullett and James Fairbairn had destabilized Robert Menzies' wartime government. As a direct but delayed consequence, John Curtin became prime minister in October 1941. Controversially, this book also tells the story of whether Air Minister Fairbairn, rather than the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) pilot Bob Hitchcock, had been at the controls.

one photo of the Stinson Airliner

\"On Friday, 19 February 1937, a cyclone was in full force and raging through the tangled jungle of the McPherson Range on the border of New South Wales and Queensland.\" (TOUCHDOWN) A Stinson airliner disappeared during this destructive storm. Find out how one man searched through the dense jungle to find the remains of the burnt plane and two survivors. His heroic rescue mission is described.

The risk posed by wildlife to air transportation is of great concern worldwide. In Australia alone, 17,336 bird-strike incidents and 401 animal-strike incidents were reported to the Air Transport Safety Board (ATSB) in the period 2010-2019. Moreover, when collisions do occur, the impact can be catastrophic (loss of life, loss of aircraft) and involve significant cost to the affected airline and airport operator (estimated at globally US$1.2 billion per year). On the other side of the coin, civil aviation, and airport operations have significantly affected bird populations. There has been an increasing number of bird strikes, generally fatal to individual birds involved, reported worldwide (annual average of 12,219 reported strikes between 2008-2015 being nearly double the annual average of 6,702 strikes reported 2001-2007) (ICAO, 2018). Airport operations including construction of airport infrastructure, frequent take-offs and landings, airport noise and lights, and wildlife hazard management practices aimed at reducing risk of birdstrike, e.g., spraying to remove weeds and invertebrates, drainage, and even direct killing of individual hazard species, may result in habitat fragmentation, population decline, and rare bird extinction adjacent to airports (Kelly T, 2006; Zhao B, 2019; Steele WK, 2021). Nevertheless, there remains an imperative to continually improve wildlife hazard management methods and strategies so as to reduce the risk to aircraft and to bird populations. Current approved wildlife risk assessment techniques in Australia are limited to ranking of identified hazard species, i.e., are ‘static’ and, as such, do not provide a day-to-day risk/collision likelihood. The purpose of this study is to move towards a dynamic, evidence-based risk assessment model of wildlife hazards at airports. Ideally, such a model should be sufficiently sensitive and responsive to changing environmental conditions to be able to inform both short and longer term risk mitigation decisions. Challenges include the identification and quantification of contributory risk factors, and the selection and configuration of modelling technique(s) that meet the aforementioned requirements. In this article we focus on likelihood of bird strike and introduce three distinct, but complementary, assessment techniques, i.e., A lgebraic, B ayesian, and C lustering (ABC) for measuring the likelihood of bird strike in the face of constantly changing environmental conditions. The ABC techniques are evaluated using environment and wildlife observations routinely collected by the Brisbane Airport Corporation ( BAC ) wildlife hazard management team. Results indicate that each of the techniques meet the requirements of providing dynamic, realistic collision risks in the face of changing environmental conditions.

Globally, civil air traffic has been growing rapidly in recent years, and with this growth, there has been a considerable improvement in air safety. However, in Indonesia, the recent rate of incidents and accidents in aviation is far higher than the global average. This study aims to assess civil aviation safety occurrences in Indonesia and, for the first time, to investigate factors contributing to these occurrences within commercial Indonesian aviation operations. In this study, 97 incident/accident investigation reports published by the Indonesian National Transportation Safety Committee between 2007 and 2015 were analysed. The most common occurrences involved Runway Excursions, Loss of Control In-Flight, and Controlled Flight into Terrain. In terms of the likelihoods of the occurrences and the severity of consequences, Runway Excursions were more common while Loss of Control In-Flight and Controlled Flight into Terrain events were more severe and often involved fatalities. In Indonesia, Runway Excursions were usually nonfatal and comprised 45% of the occurrences for commercial flights, compared to 34% globally. Further, in this study, weather and Crew Resource Management issues were found to be common contributing factors to the occurrences. Weather was a contributing factor for almost 50% of the occurrences involving Indonesian commercial flights. Adverse weather contributed to Loss of Visual Reference for visual flight operations in mountainous areas, which contributed to the majority of Indonesian fatal accidents. The combination of Indonesian monsoon climate and mountainous weather characteristics appears to provide many risks, mitigation of which may require specialist pilot training, particularly for multicrew aircraft. In identifying the main contributing factors, this study will hopefully provide motivation for changes in training and operations to enhance future aviation safety in Indonesia.

The keyhole wasp ( Pachodynerus nasidens Latreille 1812), a mud-nesting wasp native to South and Central America and the Caribbean, is a relatively recent (2010) arrival in Australia. In its native range it is known to use man-made cavities to construct nests. A series of serious safety incidents Brisbane Airport related to the obstruction of vital airspeed measuring pitot probes on aircraft possibly caused by mud-nesting wasps, prompted an assessment of risk. An experiment was designed to determine the species responsible, the types of aircraft most affected, the seasonal pattern of potential risk and the spatial distribution of risk on the airport. A series of replica pitot probes were constructed using 3D-printing technology, representing aircraft with high numbers of movements (landings and take-offs), and mounted at four locations at the airport. Probes were monitored for 39 months. Probes blocked by mud nesting wasps were retrieved and incubated in mesh bags. Emerging wasps were identified to species. Results show that all nests in probes were made by P . nasidens , and peak nesting occurs in the summer months. Nesting success (as proportion of nests with live adult emergents) was optimal between 24 and 31°C and that probes with apertures of more than 3 mm diameter are preferred. Not all areas on the airport are affected equally, with the majority of nests constructed in one area. The proportion of grassed areas within 1000 m of probes was a significant predictor of nesting, and probe volume may determine the sex of emerging wasps.

The world has been proactively seeking solutions to control the spread of the COVID-19 virus since 2020. A major defensive action is implementing contactless services into everyday activities to reduce viral spread. Drones can provide contactless services in transporting goods and medical supplies, thus reducing the risk of spreading the virus. This paper aims to investigate the future trends of commercial uses for drones in Australia in the next five years. It will explore the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) industry and its different applications in Australia over the same timeframe; it also considers whether the use of drones in medical services will increase due to the epidemic. Primary data are gathered and evaluated to consider these issues, supported by a set of secondary data. The research aims to provide a holistic direction for the UAV industry, and in particular, for the Australian drone service providers and regulator to modify their operation strategies.

ObjectivesOccupational exposure to cosmic and ultraviolet radiation may increase airline pilots’ risk of cutaneous melanoma. Meta-analyses of available data show a higher than average incidence of melanoma in airline pilots, but the most recent systematic review revealed that few contemporary data are available. Moreover, all relevant studies have been conducted in Northern Hemisphere populations. We therefore aimed to examine if Australian commercial pilots have a raised incidence of melanoma compared with the general population.MethodsWe examined all melanoma histologically diagnosed among Australian-licensed commercial pilots in the period 2011–2016 by manually reviewing de-identified data in the medical records system of the Australian Civil Aviation Safety Authority. We estimated age-specific incidence rates and compared these with corresponding population rates using standardised incidence ratios (SIRs) as measures of relative risk. Expected numbers were calculated by multiplying age- and calendar period-specific person-years (PYs) with corresponding rates from the entire Australian population; 95% CI were calculated assuming a Poisson distribution of the observed cases.ResultsIn this cohort of Australian-licensed commercial pilots observed for 91 370 PYs, 114 developed a melanoma (51 invasive, 63 in situ). More than 50% of melanomas occurred on the trunk, and the predominant subtype was superficial spreading melanoma. The SIR for invasive melanoma was 1.20 (95% CI 0.89 to 1.55) and for melanoma in situ, 1.39 (95% CI 1.08 to 1.78).ConclusionAustralian-licensed commercial pilots have a modestly raised risk of in situ melanoma but no elevation of invasive melanoma compared with the general population.

Surveying the breeding population of a given species can be difficult for many logistic reasons. Marine turtles are a challenging taxon for the study of reproductive ecology and breeding strategies, because turtles aggregate off-shore and males remain exclusively at sea. For successful management of sea turtle populations, determining operational sex ratios (OSRs) on a continuing basis is critical for determining long-term population viability, particularly in the context of changing hatchling sex ratios due to temperature-dependent sex determination in a warming climate. To understand how survey technique and stage of the breeding season might influence the ability to detect turtles and determine OSRs, we surveyed the presence and identified the sex of adult male and female green sea turtles (Chelonia mydas) using a boat and small commercial unoccupied/unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), at the start (October) and peak (December) of a nesting season at an important breeding site at Heron Island, Great Barrier Reef, Australia. The ratio of males to females within the breeding ground detected by both survey methods changed from being male-biased in October to heavily female-biased in December, indicating that most males cease their reproductive effort and depart before the peak of the nesting season. Surveying with a UAV more than doubled the rate of turtles seen per minute of survey effort compared with surveying solely from the boat and allowed surveys to be conducted at times and/or places unsafe or inaccessible for boats. The sex of a slightly greater proportion of turtles seen could not be identified by observers using a UAV versus a boat, although more turtles were detected using the UAV. The departure of many males during the peak of the nesting season is likely due to an increasing biological cost of residency in the area because males encounter fewer receptive females as the season progresses and the limited foraging opportunity is insufficient to support the number of males present. Overall, we found that UAVs are an effective tool for studying important but difficult to observe aspects of sea turtle biology.