19 September 2018

Night Vision Goggles Bringing Wildfires Into Focus - Part 2

A number of fire agencies use Night Vision Goggles (NVG) for wildland firefighting. Nowhere has this been more true than in Southern California. In this second instalment, helicopter pilots detail their history and experience with NVG over the years.
15 September 2018

Are You Ready for Only One Pilot in Your Cockpit?: Hal, Is That You?

What it means to “pilot” a commercial airplane has shifted over the years, and a current proposal is challenging the unique relationship pilots have with their airplanes.
30 August 2018

Karlene Petitt — Flight To Success

Karlene Petitt has an extensive aviation career and has so many credentials to her name. Almost too many to list. From Airbus pilot to author, to PhD student, not to mention a busy grandmother to 7, she is certainly moving at the pace of a jet stream.
24 August 2018

Pull Head Out Of Donkey: Situational Awareness

Two words took on significance in the aviation world many years ago because three highly trained pilots crashed a perfectly good aeroplane. Situational Awareness.

23 August 2018

Fighting Australian Bushfires — People First

Bushfires are part of Australia’s history. With multiple agencies and organisations throughout Australia involved in managing the ever-present threat of bushfires, the ability to share a common view of a rapidly unfolding emergency situation is essential to a well-formed response. TracPlus has provided Australia’s NAFC with a cost-effective and proven solution to this problem.
16 August 2018

Captain Ray Cronin — Putting His Best Foot Forward

From Air Force Cadet, to one of Australia’s most influential pilots. Meet the man behind Australian aerial firefighting, Captain Ray Cronin.
14 August 2018

Night Vision Goggles Bringing Wildfires Into Focus - Part I

The advantages of fighting fires at night have not gone unnoticed internationally. Night-flying experiments have been conducted in Victoria, Australia, to determine whether NVG would be safe in the pitch-black Outback and rural areas devoid of any manmade light sources.

10 August 2018

Keeping the fires burning — Australian Firehawks and the threat to manned aircraft

A recent study has confirmed what Indigenous Australians, and most of those in the firefighting industry, have known all along — raptors are using bushfires to corner their prey.
3 August 2018

Why Aren't There More Chicks in the Cockpit?

Women have proven to the world that we can hurl a piece of machinery through the air at a high rate of speed just as gloriously as a man, or handle an emergency with the focus and calm of a Buddhist Monk, but it’s just not that high on our list of priorities. If a woman wants to be a pilot, she can be a pilot, so why are only 4% of all ATPs issued to women, and how does our society change that statistic?
30 July 2018

New Feature: Status Boards

Introducing "TracPlus Status Boards" - providing complete mission awareness at a glance. If you've got high value assets out on a mission and you need to know what they're doing, where they're going and how they're doing it, then capturing that data in an easy to understand screen is essential to ensure a smooth operation.