[Peetwo]

GlenB embuggerance update: 15/11/2025

Courtesy archangel7, via the UP: Glen Buckley and Australian small business -V- CASA

I’m new to this thread but after reading all 152 pages and digging around online, this is the picture I’ve put together.

Firstly, would like to point out that I I might be a bit biased in this post as I know Glen personally and was fortunate enough to meet him a few times over the years at his peak and he’s honestly a great bloke who didn’t deserve to go down this path. He was good for the training industry. And yeah, I’ll admit he probably “poked the bear” with CASA a little bit too hard initially (which is never a smart move), as rightly so, Glen was frustrated with CASA and there was a lot of financial discomfort due to CASA's understaffing at that time. Anyways, but this whole thing still really grabbed my attention. So, here is what I've comprehended so far as I understand it.

Before 2018 – Everything running normally
• Glen was running APTA under a central AOC/141/142 setup.
• The business was growing, jobs were being created, and people from all over Victoria had the chance to learn to fly and enjoy aviation or build a career.
• CASA knew about it, approved it, worked with him, and had even helped bring other schools under the same structure.
• No major issues, everything functioning as intended.
• 2018 – CASA staff change in the Southern Region
• New team comes in.
• They take a very different view of how glen should run his business. In other words, the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing.
• Basically a new interpretation of something CASA had been fine with for years.
• Late 2018 – The hammer drops
• CASA suddenly decides the structure isn’t acceptable anymore.
• No accident, no incident, no safety concern… just a change in interpretation.
• Glen gets given a 7-day “certainty of operation” notice, which in reality is a commercial shutdown.
• That’s when everything starts falling apart.
• 2019–2020 – APTA collapses
• The 7-day situation and all the restrictions make the business unworkable.
• Glen loses the business and ends up bankrupt.
• This all happens with zero safety breaches behind it.
• People lose their jobs.
• Ombudsman investigation – The important bit
• Glen goes to the Commonwealth Ombudsman.
• During that process, CASA admits there’s no legislation stopping the franchising model Glen was using.
• So the structure they later said was unacceptable… wasn’t illegal at all.
• And plenty of other schools use similar setups. I’ve seen it myself. The structure worked really well, with a base manager working off APTA employed by the subcontractor.
Now – Still no resolution
• Glen alleges misfeasance and bad behavior by certain CASA people.
• CASA denies everything, of course.
• No court has ruled on any of it.
• But the end result is clear: a bloke loses his business and ends up bankrupt without any safety trigger.
If I’ve got anything wrong or missed something in the time line, happy for someone to correct me.

My opinion: did CASA go too far? Absolutely yes. Where were the mentoring options, the training, the proper timelines to fix whatever they thought was wrong? Was this a staffing issue inside CASA, or were they under pressure and just took the quickest, bluntest path? Either way, did Glen deserve to lose his entire business over it? No, not at all. And it makes you wonder whether CASA has become so locked into its own procedures and internal doctrine that there’s no room left for practical judgement or real-world common sense anymore. In my own experience, I’ve actually found the FAA and EASA to be the complete opposite. They’re strict on safety — absolutely — but they know how to focus on what actually matters, use discretion, and apply common sense without compromising standards or destroying people’s livelihoods. They look at outcomes. Yes, there’s box-ticking, but when common sense is needed, they assess the situation properly and deal with it case by case.From what I’ve seen in GA and the airlines over the years, CASA can get very autocratic and dogmatic at times. And you really do have to wonder whether they ever stop to think about the livelihoods they blow up in the process. Is this a wider, systemic problem in Australian aviation?

CASA, on the other hand, seems to get stuck in its own internal processes to the point where flexibility, proportionality, and basic fairness go out the window. Again without considering peoples livelihoods.

I remember back in 2018–2019 CASA allowed a setup in Mildura where multiple AOCs were operating under the same roof for a Chinese-owned school. The same operation that was widely reported in the media at the time for alleged embezzlement overseas. They had multiple training certificates, several different Heads of Operations, and different safety systems and manuals, all running side-by-side in the same building teaching cadets, and CASA seemed completely fine with that arrangement. Yet when a small operator like Glen runs a centralised model that CASA themselves had approved for years, suddenly it becomes “non-compliant.” let's shut them down! It really shows there’s no level playing field: some operators get enormous flexibility while others get shut down over interpretations that clearly aren’t applied consistently.

On another note, I honestly don’t see how destroying small businesses like Glen’s has any impact on safety whatsoever. CASA also loves to say, on numerous occasions, that we are “second to none” in safety. Really? Because when you look at GA in Australia over the last few years, the number of serious accidents doesn’t exactly back that up. And the Mangalore mid-air still baffles me to this day. Two aircraft on IFR, under radar control, and yet nothing meaningful has been put in place to prevent that kind of situation from happening again. Instead of real systemic changes, it felt like all the focus landed on the pilots who aren’t here to defend themselves.

Just my 5 cents worth.

Plus Sandy's reply:

Archangel’s synopsis of the CASA / Glen Buckley disaster

Archangel, I think you’ve summed up the story very well. There’s no doubt in my mind that there’s been a serious breech of justice in CASA’s treatment of Glen Buckley.

To add insult to injury, if I remember correctly, Glen was offered $20,000 in compensation where $3 or $4 million might have been appropriate.

While the independent Commonwealth corporate CASA lives in the dry cleaned isolation of Can’tberra, the most socialistic capital in the free world, and remains untouched by Ministerial control (hence some accountability to the electorate) nothing will change.

Labor Transport Minister Gareth Evans got rid of aviation out of his Department and responsibility. He created what is now CASA in 1988 in flagrant disregard of the Westminster principle that the major arms of government are controlled in a regular Department with a Minister at head.

No government since, including previous Transport Ministers such as A. Albanese, Darren Chester, Warren Truss, Michael McCormick or Barnaby Joyce has had the brains or intestinal fortitude to right this wrong.
But to your point about safety, aviation safety has suffered due to the incredibly stupid separation of GA by the creation of RAAUS.

This measure alone, another blatant resiling from responsibility, has resulted in numerous crashes because many GA pilots have been induced to fly aircraft that have often been too small for Australian conditions. This fact has been recognised, belatedly, by the fact that it’s acknowledged that the weight limit should be increased to 760kg.

Other factors against safety, the loss of hundreds of flying schools and the experienced instructors that used to be in charge.

And the migration into the criminal code of just about everything that used to be considered minor breaches of safety codes and that were properly classed as misdemeanours.

The upshot here is a CASA induced climate of fear of becoming a criminal, and that fear is bad news for mental capability, besides try travelling international with a criminal conviction.

And finally from aroa:

Hear, hear, Archangel and Sandy.
This “Department of Aviation” without a Minister has been a corrupted outfit for decades. The moniker CAsA is a misnomer. Un civil, un safe and done a colossal disservice to the aviation industry in this country.
Nothing, NOTHING, will ever change with ahidebound bureaurats and liars like Dr Discrepancy aka Aleck, and a perjuring CEO at the time, it gave proof that the place is beyond redemption. Glen is a classic example and there have been many, many others. NO Minister, no hope for the citizen when CAsA is a law unto itself. A disgrace to the nation.
What a humungeous waste of taxpayers dollars in an outfit bereft of morals, legality, fair dealing and natural justice.
Will it ever be thus ?

MTF...P2