An Australian Aviation report published on 22 October 2026 says an Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) survey of aerial firefighting pilots found a marked difference between respondents’ reported experience of incidents and whether they said they had reported them. Of 149 pilots surveyed, 91 (61 per cent) said they experienced an incident between 2017 and 2022, while 52 (35 per cent) said they had reported one. Those figures raise a safety-learning concern: occurrences that are not reported may be less visible to operators, fire agencies and safety investigators.
The scope of what the…