This evening I attended a CASA safety seminar organised by Peter Ball of the Darwin Office of CASA. I think we were all surprised by volume of people who attended and refreshingly the youthfulness of the attendees.

It was interesting to note that the younger pilots in the main were the GA pilots flying possibly older aircraft and the RA-Aus contingent were older pilots flying newer aircraft.

There were at least 73 attendees there as that was one of the numbers drawn out of the lucky door prizes - More on that later. We had Barry H, Barry S, Michael C, Alan and Dianne, Ron and Annabelle, Greg, John B, myself and Joe representing TEFC membership.

The topics covered "Weather to Fly" from Mark Richardson which I have heard before, but it is a great refresher and yes I am getting the books out again to refresh myself. Mark gives a great talk filled with war stories to bring the point home.

I made a note that we can pick up the weather from the automatic service on 128.45.

We had an informative session from the RAAF folk who run the tower and approach. There were two bits of take away for me regarding this presentation. One was that it was okay to pass weather information regarding our current weather conditions back using an Air Report and secondly that the tower is open to visits from pilots so I think we should liase with the guys and arrange a "school trip" when there isn't an exercise underway to find out what goes on in the tower.

Finally there was another great presentation by Andrew Warland-Browne on Situational Awareness. This is being taught and really should be integrated into our Human Factors course in the same informative and entertaining way it was delivered by Andrew. I still think it was 11 shots by the white shirts!

Then we got to the door prizes which included ipods and with all the CASA folk in the room and I understand a Policeman was drawing the tickets - we could say that there definately was government supervision and 4 of the prizes (2 ipods and weekend at the resort and yet another prize which I didn't hear what it was - but Skippy will be able to tell you) were won by Top End Flying Club Members.

It was decided by the folks at CASA not to avail themselves of our offer of flights in our RA-Aus aircraft and from a liability point of view I can understand why the offer was appreciated but refused for reasons that a fellow public servant understands only too well.

To Peter and the guys - a great informative night and thanks for the information (and the ipod) - I feel as if I should get Stephen Fry to narrate parts of the Visual Flight Guide or AIPs into it.

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