#28: Flight counter inaccurate

60 Reasons to Protest: Reason #28 – Flight counter inaccurate

Brisbane Airport’s Runway Usage Tool is supposed to keep track of the number of flight movements for the public to view and query on BAC’s website. Since September 2022, BAC and Airservices Australia have been providing dodgy flight movement data, which led to an eight-month-long struggle to resolve the issue. The Runway Usage Tool has repeatedly been providing incorrect data, and it took a significant amount of time and community effort to get BAC to listen and rectify the situation each time.

In late March 2023, BAC reported 381,000 flights from the opening of the New Parallel Runway. However, in early April 2023, BAC was reporting 492,000 flights over the same period of time. That is 111,000 additional flights, 110 flights extra per day.

Alarm bells should have been ringing loud and clear for BAC. 110,000 flights represent a margin of error that is untenable and embarrassing for two colluding organisations that keep saying they are guided by truth, accuracy and precision.

BFPCA community members kept a log file of their interactions with the airport trying to rectify the faux pas. According to the timeline, BAC lost count of 242 arriving / departing aircraft in a single day, and suggested windy conditions on the day was the culprit. While this data issue was resolved after two weeks, BAC had to be notified several times afterwards that the Runway Usage Tool was providing incorrect data yet again. BAC sought to engage their technical experts to try to fix their system errors. This led to the Runway Usage Tool being offline for nearly two months. Only after the BFPCA community sought an intervention by the Aircraft Noise Ombudsman (ANO) who investigated the matter, was the issue finally rectified.

The data errors were apparently caused by BAC’s internal processes, where a locally generated copy of the dataset was imported from Airservices’ Airport Noise Monitoring System (ANOMS). An Excel spreadsheet was used to manually update the dataset before transferring it into BAC’s Runway Usage Tool. A duplication of records in the spreadsheet resulted in double counting flight movements.

BAC’s IT team has now modified the workflow, and manual intervention has been replaced with a direct feed from Airservices’ ANOMS system. However, BFPCA remains wary, as both BAC and Airservices have a history of providing the community with false and misleading claims and statements about noise forecasts and impact assessments.

The major concern for us is the convoluted processes community members had to go through to raise the issue, for BAC to accept there was an issue, then try to get it resolved in a timely manner. Trust in Brisbane Airport and Airservices Australia is at an all time low for Brisbane families and communities. So the lack of checks and balances to ensure accurate data is released to the public is a major concern for the community.

BFPCA calls on BAC and Airservices to ensure accurate flight movements and forecasts are released to the public in a timely manner. The lack of transparency and accountability in the aviation industry is a significant issue that needs to be addressed by Catherine King MP, Minister for Infrastructure and Transport, urgently. BFPCA urges Catherine King MP – as Minister of the Department that is supposed to provide regulatory oversight and be the landlord of Brisbane Airport – to step in and conduct a thorough investigation into the series of data errors and lack of transparency and accountability at Brisbane Airport and Airservices Australia.