Australia creates panel to review Airservices after Sydney near-misses

The Australian government is setting up an independent panel to examine operational difficulties at Airservices Australia, the state-owned body that runs the country's air traffic services. The move follows several near-miss incidents at Sydney airport, Australia's busiest international gateway, during July and August.

According to the transport ministry, the panel will check that Airservices is taking prompt and practical steps on matters including controller workforce planning, recruitment, training, roster resilience and system improvements. It will also give independent assurance that the agency is putting lasting measures in place to lift its service.

The announcement coincided with the Australian Transport Safety Bureau publishing initial findings from its inquiries into four of the Sydney occurrences. ATSB chief commissioner Angus Mitchell said that although the bureau is looking at air traffic control involvement in each case, the staffing levels in Sydney Tower at the time of many of the events had become a repeated focus of the investigations.

The ATSB has not yet established whether staffing was a direct cause, according to the preliminary reports. Those reports also note that roster modelling by Airservices had flagged higher fatigue risks for staff around the time of many of the occurrences.

Mitchell said investigators are assessing how well the existing measures manage that identified risk. He said the work will look at the weight of staffing pressure inside the tower, naming in particular the combining of operational roles, the regular use of overtime to cover shifts, and training or supervision carried out alongside live operational duties.

Four incidents are under investigation.