[Peetwo]

Brisvegas public hearing update, 30/01/21 - Hansard out.. 

Via APH Hansard team:

GA inquiry - Download PDF ; or  HERE.

Sterlo's inquiry - Download PDF ; or HERE.

And to back up the P9 OBS above here is a couple of quotes:

1st from Jabiru Business Manager Mrs Susan Woods' opening statement: 

Mrs Woods : Yes, I'll just go through something I've prepared here. The Jabiru is a very small aircraft that looks much like a scaled-down Cessna 172. You would have seen them at many of the regional airports that you've landed in, although you may not have recognised them. There are approximately a thousand in Australia and another thousand scattered across most countries in the world. The Jabiru makes up about 40 per cent of the aircraft in the sports aviation sector in Australia. Jabiru Aircraft—the company—is unique in that we produce airframes, engines and propellers, as well as having the business of maintenance of both aircraft and engines. We produce and supply spare parts as well. This uniqueness makes it very difficult to fit into the box when it comes to regulations. In the aviation world, the light sport sector is near the bottom of the pecking order, although most of the pilots captaining the aircraft you commute in have learnt to fly in either a light sport aircraft or a general aviation aircraft. Our end of the aviation sector produces the pilots of tomorrow. Aviation plays such an important role in our country because we are such a vast country. It is in the national interest to keep the sector alive.

We found over the years that the labour it took to fill CASA's expectations of documentation to support our production certificates was greater than the time to produce the aircraft. It does not make sense to hold a CASA production certificate for this reason. The production certificate is not a saleable asset at the end of the day anyway, because it can't be transferred to another company without CASA's approval.

Although Jabiru has pursued and achieved CASA's type certification for Jabiru models in the past, it is not something that makes business sense. Holding on to type certificates stifles innovation, and, at the end of the day, the type certificates are worthless because they represent an outdated product. It is unthinkable to undertake certification of any new model aircraft through CASA; it will only lead to financial ruin. CASA does not have to meet monetary deadlines.

Our Civil Aviation Act states:

In exercising its powers and performing its functions, CASA must regard the safety of air navigation as the most important consideration.

There are no words in the act for consideration of the cost of safety or differentiation between acceptable risk of commercial airline travel and acceptable risk of sport aviation. The one set of rules is wielded over all sectors of certified aircraft when it comes to the production of aircraft, engines and propellers.

It is not viable for a manufacturer to operate under the CASA production regulations. All companies that have tried in recent times have failed financially, no matter how good their product. The documentation, compliance and auditing are so draining of resources with little to add to safety.

The only way for us to survive has been to give up our CASA production certificates and exclusively produce to the ASTM airworthiness standards for light sport aircraft and to self-certify our products. That way, CASA is relieved of the liability of certification of our products. This is in keeping with CASA's mission to dump their organisational risk, so is accepted by CASA. Because it is not possible for all the sectors of aviation to deliver airline-levels of safety, CASA has taken measures to shed its exposure to the risk of these other sectors.

In our case, at the end of December 2014, CASA took very public action, without consultation, in the form of a CASA limitation that forced our customers and flying schools, among other things, to sign an acknowledgement that there was a risk of death by flying behind our engines. In so doing, CASA could avoid any risk of litigation concerning past approvals given by CASA. This action was driven by Jonathan Aleck, head of the CASA legal department at the time. This action destroyed many flying schools using our aircraft and almost destroyed us, personally, and our business. We were engaged with CASA constantly for two years, until they gained an understanding of our sector of aviation, at our expense. The limitations were then amended to exempt those aircraft compliant to our manufacturer's instructions, but the limitations still stand today. Every time the expiry date comes up, CASA notify us the day before and reissue it for another three years. The justification given is that it is of no extra burden to operators.

While the CASA limitation is in place, it is hard to assign any value to our business. There is little financial incentive and only a whole lot of liability to carry. Not a great business model.

Dick Smith has been brave enough to speak of affordable safety, but it will be tough for politicians to tackle CASA on allowing compliance to be affordable while there is no charter for CASA to do so. Whenever CASA finds themselves on the back foot, they play the safety card. It trumps everyone else without fail.

That's mainly what I've prepared. I have some background of the company et cetera as well. You can ask about that if there is a need to.

Next from the AFAP's Mr Lachlan Gray...

...We know CASA is now developing plain English-language guides so that people can understand the standards. So whilst they might say, 'It's nice to have, and we're doing it as a nice gesture for the industry to help them along,' surely it would not be necessary if recommendation 30(b) were adopted. Recommendation 31 talks about pivoting the regulations and standards, under development at that point in time, to adopt this new methodology. I would suggest that, if that had occurred, this inquiry probably wouldn't even have been called for in the first place, but here we are.

There's certainly a degree of consistency from people talking about this inconsistency. We have a regulator on one end of the scale saying, 'There's not a problem.' For the record, we've read the responses to the questions on notice, which were supplied by CASA on the 27th of this month—only a couple of days ago—and they believe that they are meeting recommendation 30(b) and section 9 of the act, which talks about developing and promulgating appropriate, clear and concise aviation standards. The regulator believes they're already doing it, whereas the aviation community does not. So here's a real point of challenge for the committee. You've got to eventually work out what you're doing on this point, because you can't have the industry believing one thing's happening or not happening and the regulator being in disagreement with that. We suggest that the aviation community has got it right and CASA could do with a rethink, but we also suggest that they're not going to get there on their own. They're going to need direction, hence the importance of putting in a legislative amendment.

Dr Aleck of CASA, who I have high regard for, mentioned at the 20 November hearing that the 2019 amendment to the act suggested to them that the cost and risk based focus was a prominent thing, because it was in a legislative amendment. It's now in the act. So we suggest for that level of prominence about this need for change to get into CASA. It also needs to be at a legislative amendment level. The intent of that should then be articulated within the explanatory memorandum. Whilst someone who's much more legally pronounced than me might suggest that we need a definition of a system of safety, surely we can articulate the intent of it in the explanatory memorandum so we can truly have outcomes based focus and things can be achieved in the real world, as they need to be.

This complexity of regs lean more towards serving an internal purpose, as legal definitions for CASA. That's my perspective. The act talks about them being appropriate, clear and concise, as I said, but what is appropriate? There are different views from different people. If CASA believes that what they've currently got is appropriate, as they've responded to in question 2 in the questions on notice then maybe we need to provide them clear direction that it's actually not appropriate.

In summarising this, the act doesn't oblige CASA to regulate and develop standards that are based on a system of safety, but it does talk about reviewing the system of safety and promoting it, which we put as a secondary things, because how can you review a system when you've not actually developed it with regs and standards in the first place with a focus on the safety system? It also seems out of kilter. If you were to ask the general public that have watched these air crash investigation shows, they would talk about it as being 'amazing that so many things had to go wrong for that accident to occur'. People just have a general pub sort of knowledge that it's a system—that things need to work together and, if they don't, that's when it breaks. I'm sure that the general public would be a little bit aghast to learn that, in our Civil Aviation Act, there is nothing actually obliging CASA to focus on this. So just as a mere matter of need for correction and prominence, this is what we need to articulate in our Civil Aviation Act.

The next thing I'd like to talk about is governance and accountability. I've heard it mentioned before at this hearing, but I will mention again—and it's articulated in our submission—that the industry complaints commissioner is somewhat circular and points inward toward protection and not in an open circle that helps provide accountability. The ICC reports to the CASA board, and part of the CASA board is the CASA CEO and DAS. Obviously, the CEO of any organisation is the person ultimately responsible for all the decisions and the functions of that organisation, so it's circular that the person who's ultimately responsible also gets to decide the outcome of a review by the industry complaints commissioner. To put it quite simply, we're not fixed on who the ICC reports to but it should be to someone external and not to the board. Alternatively, maybe the CEO of CASA should not be on the board. We've got to break this circle just as a mere principle. I'm not particularly aware of any examples; it just seems like a broken means of accountability.

Speaking of the board, and going back to the 2008 review and inquiry, one of the recommendations that came out of that was to increase the composition of the board, and it was to address the issues that had been raised. But here we are again, 12 or 13 years later, talking about the same things. The obvious question is: was that recommendation and reform actually suited to the purpose for which it was intended? We'd suggest no, because here we are again. Whilst we don't have any issues with particular individuals on there, we also suggest that maybe the composition of it needs to be broadened so there are people there without a vested commercial and financial interest. I'm not saying that everyone on there has, but people with organisational backgrounds, rather than employee based backgrounds, are going to come with a different bent. If you want truth based accountability and direction and people willing to speak freely, you've got to diversify the composition of the board...

Well said that man! -  


MTF? - Yes much! - P2