06-20-2025, 08:03 PM
The Last Minute Hitch: 20 June 2025
20 June 2025
– Steve Hitchen
According to CASA CEO and Director of Aviation Safety Pip Spence, GA Workplan 2.0 contains 16 new initiatives that the regulator will soon reveal. The stated intent of these tasks is to reduce regulatory burden and cost on the GA sector without reducing safety. It's encouraging also that CASA has taken the lead from the General Aviation Advisory Network (GAAN) when it comes to formulating the to-do list. GAAN has proven itself to be repository of GA expertise capable of influencing government policy more than any advocacy group has done in a long time. It also forms a united voice that the minister can rely on to deliver her commonsense and defendable initiatives. If the GA Workplan is based on GAAN advice, the GA community is already a step ahead. But how big is that step going to be? I doubt that cost savings will be large enough to trigger fleet renewal programs, but any reduction in cash outflow improves industry health, especially if it's not expended on something we really didn't need anyway. And cost-saving is not the only ambition here; streamlining and removal of superfluous regulation frees-up key people to get on with the job of aviating. Doing that has the side-effect of increasing safety, which is one of CASA's key aims, and justification alone for streamlining.
"..aviation is a highly structured and mature industry into which eVTOLs are going to have to fit.."
News this week that five National Aviation Authorities had put their heads together on a roadmap for certifying eVTOLs is encouraging. The National Aviation Authorities Network currently consists of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, UK and USA, and it owes its existence to recognition that certifications standards around the world were diverging as each NAA found its feet with the new technology. I find it encouraging because this is exactly the way to deal with burgeoning innovation. In aviation's pioneering years, there were neither standards nor NAAs that defined what safe aviation was, so the new technology had no culture or operational environments to which it had to conform. That's not the case over 100 years later. Today aviation is a highly structured and mature industry into which eVTOLs are going to have to fit, and that's a lot easier if global standards are compatible with each other. However, (and this may be an unpopular view) I have to question if this AAM roadmap goes far enough. It still requires the NAA in the country of manufacture to certify the aircraft first, with further validation coming from subsequent countries. That costs dollars; big ones. And, as the FAA penned most of the current aviation standards, re-validation in other countries is tantamount to second-guessing the NAA that wrote the standard. We need to get to a point where any Type Certificate issued by one of the five countries in the network is automatically valid in all countries without the need for costly re-validation that rarely results in non-conformances anyway. eVTOLs are a great place to start that.
How many times have we, as pilots, flown an aircraft with a known defect? Honesty should propel a lot of hands into the air. In most cases, the defect is annoying more than disabling, and we have work-arounds that get us there. But like fixes that substitute for solutions, they so often become the norm. That's one of the main take-aways from the Twin Commander crash in 2023: eventually a temporary solution is likely to let you down. In this case–according to the ATSB–it was a known defect in the pressurisation system. The company work-around worked until such time as it didn't; it was too late to do anything by then. ATSB investigations are designed so that others can learn from an incident, and if we take no notice of this one, an opportunity to re-evaluate our own operating minima when it comes to airworthiness is going to be lost. As pilots, we are often called upon to decide whether or not an aircraft is operationally safe; you could argue we do that before every flight. What we need to do is have the courage and conviction to ground an aeroplane regardless of the ramifications of doing so. Safe aviation shouldn't be a decision, it should be a procedure.
May your gauges always be in the green,
Hitch
20 June 2025
– Steve Hitchen
According to CASA CEO and Director of Aviation Safety Pip Spence, GA Workplan 2.0 contains 16 new initiatives that the regulator will soon reveal. The stated intent of these tasks is to reduce regulatory burden and cost on the GA sector without reducing safety. It's encouraging also that CASA has taken the lead from the General Aviation Advisory Network (GAAN) when it comes to formulating the to-do list. GAAN has proven itself to be repository of GA expertise capable of influencing government policy more than any advocacy group has done in a long time. It also forms a united voice that the minister can rely on to deliver her commonsense and defendable initiatives. If the GA Workplan is based on GAAN advice, the GA community is already a step ahead. But how big is that step going to be? I doubt that cost savings will be large enough to trigger fleet renewal programs, but any reduction in cash outflow improves industry health, especially if it's not expended on something we really didn't need anyway. And cost-saving is not the only ambition here; streamlining and removal of superfluous regulation frees-up key people to get on with the job of aviating. Doing that has the side-effect of increasing safety, which is one of CASA's key aims, and justification alone for streamlining.
"..aviation is a highly structured and mature industry into which eVTOLs are going to have to fit.."
News this week that five National Aviation Authorities had put their heads together on a roadmap for certifying eVTOLs is encouraging. The National Aviation Authorities Network currently consists of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, UK and USA, and it owes its existence to recognition that certifications standards around the world were diverging as each NAA found its feet with the new technology. I find it encouraging because this is exactly the way to deal with burgeoning innovation. In aviation's pioneering years, there were neither standards nor NAAs that defined what safe aviation was, so the new technology had no culture or operational environments to which it had to conform. That's not the case over 100 years later. Today aviation is a highly structured and mature industry into which eVTOLs are going to have to fit, and that's a lot easier if global standards are compatible with each other. However, (and this may be an unpopular view) I have to question if this AAM roadmap goes far enough. It still requires the NAA in the country of manufacture to certify the aircraft first, with further validation coming from subsequent countries. That costs dollars; big ones. And, as the FAA penned most of the current aviation standards, re-validation in other countries is tantamount to second-guessing the NAA that wrote the standard. We need to get to a point where any Type Certificate issued by one of the five countries in the network is automatically valid in all countries without the need for costly re-validation that rarely results in non-conformances anyway. eVTOLs are a great place to start that.
How many times have we, as pilots, flown an aircraft with a known defect? Honesty should propel a lot of hands into the air. In most cases, the defect is annoying more than disabling, and we have work-arounds that get us there. But like fixes that substitute for solutions, they so often become the norm. That's one of the main take-aways from the Twin Commander crash in 2023: eventually a temporary solution is likely to let you down. In this case–according to the ATSB–it was a known defect in the pressurisation system. The company work-around worked until such time as it didn't; it was too late to do anything by then. ATSB investigations are designed so that others can learn from an incident, and if we take no notice of this one, an opportunity to re-evaluate our own operating minima when it comes to airworthiness is going to be lost. As pilots, we are often called upon to decide whether or not an aircraft is operationally safe; you could argue we do that before every flight. What we need to do is have the courage and conviction to ground an aeroplane regardless of the ramifications of doing so. Safe aviation shouldn't be a decision, it should be a procedure.
May your gauges always be in the green,
Hitch