Adjust font size:

Amendments to Appendix 7 of the DOTARS Annual Report 2001-02

Appendix 7 of the Department of Transport and Regional Services Annual Report 2001-02 lists Australian Transport Safety Bureau recommendations released in the course of 2001-02 and the status of responses to those recommendations. It also lists safety advisory notices. During 2002 the ATSB has been upgrading the software for its OASIS aviation safety database to publish, via the ATSB website, the status of recommendations it has made. A significant amount of effort has been focused on publishing safety recommendations and safety advisory notices made by the ATSB since its creation and before. This has involved a review of each record held within the database.

As part of this activity, it was established in October 2002 that some of the records were not being recognised by database queries as a result of incomplete date fields and that this was causing anomalies in reports. While the ATSB recommendations issued and the paper-based file records of responses were correct, the electronic records generated lacked or corrupted a significant amount of the information held on file. It has been established that the root of the problems is systemic and can be traced to the original establishment of the database and subsequent procedures and training over many years prior to the establishment of the ATSB.

As a result, tables 26 and 27 at Appendix 7 of the published DOTARS Annual Report contains less recommendations than should have been published and included some errors in response dates. When the errors were discovered, a program to correct and align data and ensure that errors do not occur in the future was immediately commenced. Ten recommendations found to be missing have now been inserted and the errors in response dates corrected. Procedures for maintaining the database have been updated and records for prior years are being reviewed and if necessary corrected.

The attached replacement pages for Appendix 7 tables 26 and 27 should be inserted into the DOTARS Annual Report 2001-02 at page 299.

I wish to publicly convey my sincere apologies to the Minister, Secretary and to Members, Senators and stakeholders for the errors in the original Appendix 7.

Kym Bills
Executive Director

14 November 2002