Drew McKinnie
Safety Manager
Saturday 18 – Sunday 19 October 2025, Best Western Airport Motel Conference Centre, Atwood, VIC (near Tullamarine & Westmeadows)
MEETING OF OUR BEST HUMAN FACTORS SAFETY AND CLUB SUPPORT MINDS
We make our biggest advances in safety when we work in collaboration and share our experiences, ideas and insights. Those advances result from challenging our thinking with the wisdom of our best minds, and generate discussions with our peers and friends.
In 2024, the Skyward Summit Safety Seminars generated high value briefings and safety awareness events in Brisbane QLD, Jandakot WA, Camden NSW, Murray Bridge SA. A deliberately multidisciplinary approach was taken, allowing good interactions with departmental specialists and the new GAus Executive team. GAus also participated in industry safety conferences and educative forums held by Safeskies, ASAC and PACDEFF. We learned much from those gatherings.
In 2025 we intend to hold a major safety and clubs round table event in a conference setting. It is time for us to tackle human factors safety aspects. In particular, we need to look deeper than just operational and airworthiness data, learn more from what has gone wrong and decide what can be done better.
How many times have you read an occurrence report or crash comic, pondered the facts about a defect or airworthiness issue, or a manoeuvre gone wrong or loss of control, or an environmental risk being realised – and then asked ‘why’? Why did that go wrong? What caused that decision or error to be made? What pressures were they under? Sometimes it’s easy to think ‘pilot error’ or ‘dumb decision’ or ‘I would never do that’ Yet we sometimes fail to think about the latent conditions that led to those problems.
Human factors thinking explores the organisational and cultural factors such as resourcing, information, systems, normalised processes and practices, training errors, educative gaps, decisions and biases affecting our behaviours and actions.
For many years we have made use of the CASA Human Factors Resource Kits and guidance material, Flight Safety Australia, Close Calls booklets, plus resources from overseas gliding and aviation bodies. We must focus on some gliding and glider launching human factors risks and challenges.
CASA has recently approved a safety grant to assist Gliding Australia to hold this event. Plans are now being finalised, speakers arranged and, hopefully, some means of remote electronic or online participation organised for those unable to attend in person.
Who can attend? Anyone with an interest in Gliding Australia, Human Factors Safety and Club Support! Anyone – any pilot or member. Anyone looking to further their own insights and education, connections with others, and ability to help their peers and club colleagues.
PROPOSED SCHEDULE
Sat 18 October 2025 0900 - 1630
Human Factors Safety Sessions
(including lunch break finger food)
1700 – 1800 Networking and drinks
1830 Dinner at venue
Sun 19 October 2025 0900 - 1430
Opening presentation
Clubs Round Table Dialogue / Workshops
(incl lunch break finger food)
PROPOSED FOCUS AREAS
Human Factors Safety
HF and technology / systems changes, safety culture, organisational challenges, HF and occurrence trends, risk exposure, operations and airworthiness HF, ground environment HF, winch and aerotow and SLG launching HF, biases and barriers, cognitive overload, strategies for developing better HF awareness and learning, managing safety with diverse demographics
Safety Development
How to give effect to required HF and safety educative and awareness challenges, club culture, pointers and pitfalls
Club Round Table
Strategic challenges and responses, what’s working, what we can do differently or better. Becoming architects of change, adapting to resource constraints, collaborative support measures, managing succession and skills development, volunteer support and recognition.
Priorities for club support
Workshop teams and plenary
Networking
Explore useful contacts and collaboration, ideas for constructive change
SPEAKERS
We plan to bring you great entertaining keynote speakers and experts to exchange views with.
Geoff Brown, Air Marshal Retd, ex Chief of Air Force, Soaring Grand Prix winner and WGC team pilot has great insights in dealing with new technologies and the human element, safety culture and risk.
Professor Sydney Dekker is a world authority on HF and safety culture, particularly in aviation and medical professions, overcoming barriers to dialogue, and is well known in CASA and GAus, QLD gliding clubs.
James Nugent is an insightful and accomplished JWGC and WGC champion pilot, well placed to share insights on managing risks in performance soaring.
We plan sessions on towing and SLG safety, HF education and capability improvements, operations, HF in airworthiness and maintenance, HF aspects behind occurrence data, with illustrative case studies. Some familiar faces, some new.
CASA sporting aviation and sector safety risk profile team members are keen to participate, with a focus on gliding and glider towing operations, mixed operations in uncontrolled aerodromes, and HF safety awareness. We hope other aviation industry folks can attend.
We appreciate the need for open dialogue between clubs, Regions, Executive and Board principals. Interactive sessions are planned to allow round table discussions and reports from around the clubs. We seek insights and collaborative approaches on how we can better support clubs in giving effect to safety improvements, managing resources and constraints, identifying barriers and issues requiring priority attention. Some remote online participation is planned to facilitate this.
Of course, much high value networking and ideas will come from the planned dinner event.
A detailed program will be published as soon as possible. Speakers, budgets, logistics and other elements are being developed and approved.
