2011 Conference
The 10th biennial Safeskies Aviation Safety Conference will be held on Wednesday 26 and Thursday 27 October at the Hyatt Hotel in Canberra.
It will be preceded by the Ansett memorial Lecture 2011, which will be a joint presentation by Australian astronaut Dr Andy Thomas and his wife, fellow astronaut Dr Shannon Walker.
The conference will open on the Wednesday with a powerful panel of the four members of the Aviation Policy Group: Mike Mrdak, the Secretary of the Department of Infrastructure and Transport, Air Marshal Mark Binskin, Chief of Air Force, John McCormick, Director of CASA and Greg Russell, CEO of Airservices Australia.
Other high-profile speakers invited to contribute include:
- Kevin Humphrey, Director Safety Regulation, Irish Aviation Authority
- Martin Dolan, Chief Commissioner ATSB
- Dr Kathy Abbott, NASA Ames/FAA project
- Group Captain Alan Clements, Director Defence Aviation and Air Force Safety
- Lt Col Raymond E King, USAF
- Yanick Malinge, Head of Safety Airbus
- Greg Marshall, BHP Aviation, BARS Program Manager
- Vince Galotti, Deputy Head, Air Navigation Bureau, ICAO
For more information: www.safeskiesaustralia.org
Safeskies History
The first Safeskies event was held in late 1993 and the keynote speaker was USAF Colonel, airline pilot and novelist John Nance.
Other highlights of that very first conference included presentations by Capt Danny Maurino from ICAO, Dr John Lauber from the US NTSB, and Don Kendell of Kendell Airlines.
But Safeskies went forward plagued by financial challenges and there was a clear need for a focused effort to raise $50,000 to drive the next event. That task fell to committee member Peter Lloyd who was also asked to take on the Chairmanship.
Peter Lloyd stood down as Executive Chairman of Safeskies in 2008 and continued his honorary work as President.
Peter Lloyd AO OBE MiD has had a long business and aviation career as founder, director, chairman or CEO/managing director or a director of a number of public companies and some private enterprises in Australia, France, UK and the USA. He has worked closely with world leaders in France, UK, USA, Russia and several other countries, and has been honoured by them one way or another. Peter Lloyd’s career involvement covers the motor industry, aviation, tourism, finance and the film industry and as a grazier/farmer on the Snowy River.
Lloyd introduced the idea of opening the next Safeskies in 1997 with a high-profile international guest speaker and a formal dinner. The speaker slot became a fixture from then on, branded as the Ansett Memorial Lecture in honour of airline founder and aviation philanthropist Sir Reginald Ansett.
The first Ansett Memorial lecturer was Bill Gaubatz, an American rocket scientist. Subsequent lecturers were Captain John Young USN (Ret), a senior NASA astronaut, Captain Etienne Tarnowski, an experimental test pilot with Airbus, Geoff Dixon, CEO of Qantas, Burt Rutan, renowned aerospace engineer, Sir Rod Eddington, former CEO of British Airways and Alan Joyce, current Qantas CEO.
Peter Lloyd and Safeskies also scored a coup with the appointment of Dr Rob Lee to the committee. Aviation safety guru Rob Lee, who was a key speaker at Safeskies from the very first event, had previously run Australia’s Bureau of Air Safety Investigation (BASI) before moving to the role of Director Human Factors, Systems Safety and Communications at the new multi-modal Australian Transport Safety Bureau. He is now a much-travelled consultant on transport safety. Rob Lee’s global network of aviation safety experts has contributed much to Safeskies and continues to do so.
“We picked a theme for each conference over the years, but the story that we really wanted to tell was that aviation safety doesn’t happen by accident,” says Peter Lloyd.
But Safeskies is not about “talking heads talking to talking heads”. The committee (now board) has been determined that the conference be accessible and of interest to anyone working in aviation at any level.
As Peter Lloyd says: “Our target was the people who needed most to come, which is not the heads of departments but the fellows in the third and fourth level, anything to do with aviation”.
Safeskies has also been a facilitator for putting focus of specific safety issues in an Australian context. And a good example is the work it has done around flight instruction.
“Two conferences ago the standard of flight instruction was identified as a potential major problem,” says Peter Lloyd. “We had formal discussions with the people at CASA and they decided to use the Safeskies conference as a platform around which they could build a senior instructors’ forum. This year will be the third time it takes place at the same time as Safeskies.”
But Safeskies is more than a biennial conference, with the board active throughout the intervening months promoting aviation safety and raising funds to support the work. An example of this is the Safeskies mini-seminar held in conjunction with the Avalon Airshow this year.
CASA has been a vital part of Safeskies right from the start.
“The CASA thing grew through the work we put in with them and the benefit they got out of it,” Peter Lloyd says. “They make a generous annual contribution to the running of Safeskies.”
There has also been significant support from airlines such as Qantas and Air New Zealand, from manufacturers like Thales and Airbus, other industry operators such as Cobham and also from companies not specifically aviation related such as Bevingtons and BHP Billiton.
