Creating a Safety Reporting System

[Battson]

It is a requirement for any AOC holder to have safety system in place. In this part of the world at least.

I know what you're saying here. It is different to what I'm about to write - but just for clarity - I think we need to recognize the differences between certified air fleet operations and the nature of homebuilt aircraft. At best you will get partial community interest and participation with such a reporting system, both in terms of contributing and in terms of following through with suggested changes. Many are attracted to homebuilding because they have more freedom.


On a different vein, whether we raise awareness of such issues in a forum section called "Maintenance", or a forum section called "Safety Reporting System" - I don't think it matters, as long as we have information available. In some cases we may want to group information together, I had numerous suggestions about this recently. So that functionality seems to be something people want.

I think the biggest problem comes when information is scattered, across different forum sections, Facebook, or build logs. This makes it hard to review everything in logical groups, and make decisions accordingly.

To that end, jaredyates I suggest the data collection form also needs to include the calendar age, hours on the part, and total airframe hours. People probably want to know when they can expect such issues to arise.

[Battson]

I agree that the next steps are important, though I don't think we have to have a fully-solidified next steps plan just yet.

To answer your questions about issuing bulletins, there's no intent to change that away from Bob any time soon. My hope is to create a more frictionless feedback funnel to get the information back to Bob if it needs to getto him. I can imagine examples of things that are worth a report but that Bob might not be worried about, but that we could still make a good lesson from. At this point Bob is solely qualified to make any changes to the design, and any mandatory compliance bulletins will come from him.

The form not having granular data entry is intentional, trying to make sure the form doesn't "box in" the submitter. I think it will be easy enough to parse most of your concerns on the back end, though it could be useful to add a checkbox for whether the airplane was built primarily from a kit. I'll add that to the form proposal above.

For sure there are some instances that might be appropriate for a regulatory report such as the ASRS system in the USA, but I don't think there is a solid link in all cases between those systems and things that are nice or important to know for other operators.

As you point out, there are two paths on this reporting 'tree'.

One ends with Bob, and he does the work in that case. The other probably ends on this forum. This is how it's already working today in my view.

It's not clear how decisions are made on that second path (without an Designer / Mechanical Engineering making the decisions),. I guess the question is, who does the work - and they'll need a lot of time to volunteer, and qualifications to be credible.

Again - we don't want information scattered between Bob and the forum. We have a forum section for Bob's bulletins, and a section for other things. In my opinion, those who are going to report issues, are likely already reporting them. I think formalising the process is a good idea and offers some small benefits, but to make real change we need to reach conclusions on the solutions and have them supported with artefacts, and post comprehensive information about those artefacts. So that will be a fair bit of work for someone.

[Nev]

Bearhawkblog.com

Thanks for the feedback to everyone involved. I've made many changes to the website over the last few days, and split the "reports" into two pages - a Maintenance Notes page, and a Safety Notes page. There is now a Data Collection report form on the site that owners can fill in and send for data collation and if need be, a Safety Note will be published. For those of you that have visited the site already (thanks), you will just need to refresh (or close and reopen) your web browser before you can see the changes.

As Brooks mentioned, there are pro's and con's to doing it this way, but in the absence of a central Data Collection and Safety Report system, I decided to proceed in this direction. In the meantime if the Bearhawk community do set up a central system to achieve a similar goal, then that's even better. Hopefully it will help others and at the very least save some of those head scratching moments many of us have had. If it works as well as intended, then I hope it will prevent damage or injury and reverse any developing adverse trends.

One thing that occurs to me is the difference between Certified aircraft and Amateur built aircraft. In the certified world, when a Bulletin or AD is published, a compliance level is stated. Some are optional, some are mandatory. Some require inspection, etc. With our amateur built aircraft and the 51% rule, we (individually) are the manufacturers, each one of us, and each of our aircraft is different. We also decide individually how best to proceed with safety information that we become aware of, and whether to inspect our aircraft, or perhaps make a change.

So the Safety Notes appear on the website without any recommendation. Each of us can then individually decide how we apply that information to our own aircraft.


Screen Shot 2022-12-07 at 21.57.00.png


Screen Shot 2022-12-07 at 22.08.40.png

[Sir Newton]

You build it, people will come!

[Mark Goldberg]

Nev, I know your intentions on this effort are good. But when you say "several Bearhawks" have this or that - and I only know of one plane - that gives the wrong impression. Maybe there are more than one plane with a certain issue and I do not know about them.

I am at the kit factory now and can not engage so much with this discussion. Mark

[Sir Newton]

Getting out in front of something such as what I see brewing here in this thread Mark. Maybe be a corporate priority. Vans recognized it years ago.

[schu]

Vans is a huge company with a lot of engineers and support people. Mark an Bob are only two people and do an amazing job given the limited hours of the day. For this reason we can't expect them to do what Vans does.

[Sir Newton]

Schu
I am like you, I expect nothing from anyone.
The reason I am here is because 1st I love aviation, 2nd I am freedom loving Homebuilder with a heavy dose of experimenting with non traditional ideas. Can't is not in my vocabulary

[Nev]

Nev, I know your intentions on this effort are good. But when you say "several Bearhawks" have this or that - and I only know of one plane - that gives the wrong impression.

Hi Mark. Thanks - yes all good intentions, but also acknowledging that it is somewhat difficult ground to tread.

You may be referring to the article on Rear Longeron damage. There have been two repairs carried out here in NZ (that I know of) - one was posted on the forums and the other wasn't posted. In each case I have done my best to substantiate numbers though it's not always easy and as a result I've excluded instances of damage to the vertical structure etc where it wasn't so clean cut. If anything the initial indications are that in some of these cases a larger dataset may lie behind the few occurrences that we read about on the forum. The post HERE shows the gravity of the issue with a serious accident that some of us were unaware of.

In the case of "loss of directional control on landing" (ground-loops), very few showed up on the forums, yet due to the damage they incurred they were captured in the NTSB database. However other countries databases are not so easily accessible which gets to the very nature of the discussion about how we share information.

In the case of Fuel Caps, by sharing the information we were able to ascertain that at least 15 had departed inflight, and we were then able to quickly inform others and several possible solutions were identified.

The forum discussions on Fuel Flow were extensive, yet it became apparent that only a small sample of the actual events were posted on the forum - perhaps understandably as these type of forums are not designed for accident/incident reporting and at this stage there's no other reliable method of sharing this important information in a simple manner.

[jaredyates]

There is now a link to a form available at http://bearhawksafety.com along with a revamp of the home page there. I'll also update the sticky post in the Safety forum shortly. Thanks everyone for your help so far, please let me know if you have any ideas for improvement.

[Nev]

This is an excellent initiative Jared. A Bearhawk community based data collection and Safety System will likely have the "buy-in" and sense of ownership from the community of owners in general.

These things can take time to get up and running, so people are welcome to use the Safety Notes on Bearhawk Blog in the meantime. You're also very welcome to use or publish any of the information contained there, noting that if it's on the Bearhawk Blog website, it only applies to my aircraft and may not apply to others and not be up to date etc.

Accessing the NTSB Database HERE

During my research I found it quite difficult to access the various aviation databases around the world and it occurred to me that others might experience similar difficulty. I've added screenshots below showing how to do this for the NTSB (Click the above link first). If anyone can add info on how to access other databases, please add below.

Hope this helps.


Screen Shot 2022-12-09 at 10.19.34.png

Screen Shot 2022-12-09 at 10.19.13.png

[Battson]

With our amateur built aircraft and the 51% rule, we (individually) are the manufacturers, each one of us, and each of our aircraft is different. We also decide individually how best to proceed with safety information that we become aware of, and whether to inspect our aircraft, or perhaps make a change.

That's not my understanding of New Zealand Civil Aviation Rules. It's too complex to fully go into here, but we don't have as much freedom in this respect, compared to some countries such as the USA. Long story short, I understand you are obliged to comply with a wide range of ADs, SBs, etc. including those issued by the manufacturers of the kitset. I've had this explained to me by no fewer than three of the LAMEs who I respect most, but I doubt I could accurately recite all the details.

[Nev]

Kitplanes Articles on Safety Reporting

Kitplanes have published two articles recently discussing Safety Reporting as it applies to Amateur built aircraft, and how AD's etc apply.
They are both excellent reading - I've linked them below (click or tap on the titles).

---

2E818AB2-4F2A-45FC-AF14-7C8EB6449236.jpg

---

D2B2994F-F16F-4837-8CA4-8DAA8411FF74.jpg

---

I've made many updates to the Bearhawk Blog website recently. Subscribe to receive notification when a new Safety or Maintenance note is added. It currently contains 9 Safety notes, 5 Maintenance notes, and many articles about handling and performance.


C3B103F8-E002-4EFB-9D6E-E7370D0A93A6.png