Transport committee  I would agree with that. A runway end safety area is the catchall. If something else goes wrong, it is there to save the aircraft, but if an aircraft touches down, halfway down a runway, how long does the runway end safety area have to be? Five hundred metres, 1,000 metres? Where

Transport committee  The regulation is really effective at the larger airports. It gets very difficult for smaller airports to fulfill all of the requirements, especially when it comes to the audit processes and staying on top of them. It's tough for a small airport to go out and hire a third party c

Transport committee  We're doing a bit of work in Edmonton around simulator training. We have two simulators on site. They're the only ones of their kind in North America: one for helicopters and one for 737s. There are some advantages to simulators: you can practise things in the simulator that you

Transport committee  Those periods of time in the flight are the riskiest from an aviation perspective. From a regulator's perspective, it's making sure that the regulations get through quickly and don't take so much time. We started working on runway end safety areas a number of years ago after they

Transport committee  One of the main concerns right now is funding for all the activities we have to do. Airports are heavy on infrastructure, and the cost of doing all of these items is a balance between everything we do.

Transport committee  The comment I would have is similar to Mr. Gow's comment, in that the management systems are a tool. That's simply what they are. They're a tool to help us manage the processes in the safety programs. But they're heavily reliant on people, and that gets into culture. Safety cultu

Transport committee  No, I'm not fully aware of that directive. We haven't seen that. However, we still follow the SMS regulations, which have a time frame in them for our inspections and the inspections of Transport Canada. In the absence of Transport Canada's doing them, we hire third parties to do

Transport committee  Typically, we are consulted by Transport Canada. We have an excellent working relationship with the heads of Transport Canada in Ottawa, and we meet with them on a regular basis. In fact, we met with them recently and went through a number of files. When they come out with notice

Transport committee  I don't have that detail with me. We can get that for you.

Transport committee  When I made that comment, I meant that when we look at the overall safety stats across Canada, incident rates are down.

Transport committee  One is to get young people interested in aviation, to attract them to careers within aviation. Once they're there, there are opportunities for training. We talked earlier about training the inspectors for what they're doing. The auditing function is not necessarily an inspector's

Transport committee  I can't speak to the type of training they are getting flying-wise. I can talk to the expertise within airport operations and how it works on the ground.

Transport committee  Aviation in Canada is the safest it's ever been, but it can always be better. The thing we'd like to see is more interaction with the regulator. We used to have the ability to call up the regulator and ask for a review of the regulations, or to get an interaction with them around

Transport committee  I believe there are a number of things that contribute to it. One is that there are fewer inspectors than there were before, especially within the regions. As I mentioned, the experience and expertise level isn't there, so they can't consult on things as much as they used to be a

Transport committee  It goes to the lack of expertise and experience that they have within the inspector group now. There are very new inspectors and those who do have expertise there now will be retiring over the next several years or have already retired, and they only have a limited number of insp