ILS System

22 Nov 2013 1:52 PMMichael Hart

Coolangatta Airport

Mr HART (Burleigh—LNP) (3.31 pm): I left school in 1977, many might be surprised, at 17. A year later I started work as an apprentice aircraft engineer with East West Airlines in Tamworth. For the next 20 years I worked for East West Airlines, I worked for Ansett Airlines and I spent approximately 10 years working at the Coolangatta Airport. You would not find a person who is more enthusiastic about aircraft safety, airport safety and the arrival of people safely at our airports than this person standing before you here today. One can imagine my surprise this morning when, after three hours sleep, I woke up to find the front page of the Gold Coast Bulletin saying ‘Plane crazy’. There is an article further in the paper titled, ‘Flight fright stalling storm system’, and there was an editorial that starts off, ‘Is the Burleigh MP Michael Hart serious?’ I table these for the benefit of the House.

Tabled paper: Bundle of documents including, copy of article from Gold Coast Newspaper direct, titled ‘Flight fright stalling storm system, by Andrew Potts and copy of article from GoldCoastBulletin.com.au, dated 21 November 2013, titled ‘Plane Crazy’.

Tabled paper: Article from GoldCoastBulletin.com.au, dated 21 November 2013, titled ‘Inspiring a world-class city is an art’.

The articles allege that I have called for the installation of the instrument landing system at Gold Coast airport to be delayed. That assertion is completely incorrect. For the information of the House, at no time have I suggested the installation of an ILS at Coolangatta Airport be delayed. What I have, in fact, urged aviation authorities to do is to look at advancing the availability of complementary technology that is capable of enhancing safety alongside an ILS at Coolangatta Airport. For those of you who do not know what an ILS is, what presently happens when an aeroplane comes in to land at Coolangatta Airport is they follow a VOR, which puts out a radio beacon directly off the end of the runway, and then they follow distance measuring equipment which allows them to see how far they are from the end of the runway. An ILS actually inserts a glide slope that the aeroplane can fly down. There is such a technology as RNP, which is required navigation performance, and I table an article from Wikipedia about that.

Tabled paper: Document from Wikipedia, titled ‘Required navigation performance’.

That allows an aircraft to fly a specific path between two 3D defined points in space. That means that an aeroplane can fly down this path and intersect the ILS much closer to the airport. My major concern with an ILS at the airport is the noise that will be impacting on the people in the houses that are underneath those particular routes. This is another case of our newspapers, in this case the Gold Coast Bulletin, attempting to make the news instead of reporting the news and I condemn them for that fact.

View the footage of the speech here