[Peetwo]

Project Eureka - The Jabiru embuggerance continues -

From the Klan Man - via the Oz:

Project Eureka report says Jabiru and industry ‘tangled in red tape’

• Anthony Klan
  
• The Australian
  
• April 22, 2016 12:00AM
  

Journalist
Sydney
Anthony Klan is a journalist specialising in corporate malfeasance and business reporting. He has won many awards including a Walkley Award in 2007 for Business Journalism, the 2014 News Corporation Australia Business Journalist of the Year, and the 2015 Citi Journalism Award for Excellence, Personal Finance. Have a tip off? Complete confidentiality assured: klana@theaustralian.com.au
https://plus.google.com/110790254144288601738

The Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association says CASA’s treatment of Jabiru lacks respect.

The aviation safety regulator’s treatment of local aircraft manufacturer and exporter Jabiru was unnecessarily savage and a prime example of the flaws facing the local industry, according to the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association.

AOPA Australia, which has 2600 members, has presented the federal government with a report, Project Eureka, in which it claims local aviation is “slowly dying” as a result of inappropriate and excessive regulation by government.

The group says pilots and aviators are being routinely ignored by government and it calls for policy reform, such as cutting red tape and regulatory overlap and working with industry members.

Jabiru, Australia’s biggest manufacturer and exporter of light aircraft engines, and the Civil Aviation Safety Authority have been in heated dispute since 2014 when the regulator placed strict flight restrictions on all aircraft here after Jabiru engines suffered a series of failures.

In what has been a damaging period for the company, based in Bundaberg, aircraft with Jabiru engines face restrictions when flying over populated areas and student pilots and passengers have been forced to sign litigation waivers.

AOPA says Jabiru has been treated with a “complete lack of respect” by CASA.

“The ban was supposed to be temporary, allowing time for a safety investigation of the aircraft, (but) the ban remains in force today, almost 16 months later,” AOPA says.

“In no other countries (have) national aviation regulators seen fit to impose any flight restrictions on this Australian-made aircraft. Jabiru has been very harshly treated by its regulator ... (and) the value of the aircraft and the manufacturer have been severely compromised.”

Last month, CASA released a report supporting its concerns, which found that one in 10
Jabiru engines had failed during flight, when analysing flight incidents for the six years to 2014.

However, Jabiru has attacked that report as “extremely biased”, and noted the engine was by far the safest in its light sport market segment in terms of fatalities — a fact overlooked by the report.

Jabiru general manager Susan Woods has told The Australian the report is misleading in that it fails to take into account the fact Jabiru’s engines were regularly used in experimental or home-built planes and therefore were more susceptible to backyard tinkering by inexperienced owners.

The AOPA says over-regulation and unnecessarily dense bureaucracy are key problems facing aviation in Australia.

Australia’s pilot certification regulations cover 3000 pages, but the same material in the US — which has better safety statistics than Australia by
flown hours — covers just 100 pages.

“In order to revive the general aviation industry, the regulatory and compliance cost to general aviation businesses has to be reduced,” AOPA says.

When contacted by The Australian yesterday, CASA spokesman Peter Gibson said: “As the Project Eureka report is a political document, CASA will not be commenting.”

Pinocchio said:

“As the Project Eureka report is a political document, CASA will not be commenting.”

They won't be commenting but this is what they will be doing with it, courtesy AOPA & Ken (legend) Lewis.. :

One of our authors and team leader, Mr Ken Lewis, is a current International Air Transport Operational Safety Auditor (IOSA) and former Chairman of the International Air Transport Association Safety Committee (IATA) and retired QANTAS Group General Manager Safety and Environment 1980-2002. Drawing on 50 years of experience dealing with the Australian regulators, CAA and CASA he stated:

"From my experience I can assure you they (the politicians) will send it (Eureka) to CASA for 'guidance.' CASA will then defer comment as long as they can which will be after any coming election. CASA comment to the politicians will be 'we are analysing the document and whilst we think it has some merit it is not a document drafted by experienced and proven regulation drafters such that exist within the professional ranks of CASA'."

The result will be that the Brief, like many before it, will not see the light of day. When such an eminent Australian aviation person, who is actively engaged globally in aviation regulations, loses complete faith in the ability of our regulators it is time for drastic remedial action.

 
Let us hope that this time it will be different, otherwise I fear the industry is doomed...

&..also off the Airports thread:

Also on the Project Eureka & airports front, this from Binger in the Oz today..  

Soaring rents pushing general aviation business to the brink

• Mitchell Bingemann
  
• The Australian
  
• April 22, 2016 12:00AM
  

Lindsay Edmonds of Heliflite in Bankstown says rent have risen while leases have been reduced. Picture: James Croucher

 
Soaring rents and onerous leasing conditions are pushing general aviation businesses to the brink of collapse, according to operators at some of the nation’s best-known secondary airports.

Aviation business owners at Cairns and Bankstown airports have been hit hard by rising rents over the past decade, which they say has led to a dramatic decline in aircraft on site and a loss of jobs at secondary airports.

The offer of short-term leases is also causing problems for businesses trying to secure bank loans.

“We’ve been in business 38 years and hope to stay in business but it’s clear these people don’t want us,” said Lyndsay Edmonds, who runs helicopter sales business Heliflite at Bankstown Airport.

“Our rent was $32,000 a year in 2000 but that’s jumped more than 250 per cent to $82,000 a year now. It is obvious Bankstown is trying to squeeze as much money out of us as possible.

“We came here at a time when the government was encouraging the general aviation industry. When the aerodrome was government-owned we were given a 25-year lease and low rent as an incentive. But now we struggle to get more than a five-year lease extension, which causes great uncertainty for the business.”

Murray Ireland, who runs aviation maintenance company Aero Enterprise, said he had to move his business from Cairns Airport after 15 years of tenure because of rising costs and harsh lease conditions.

“We decided to leave Cairns Airport after they increased our rent from $50,000 a year to $120,000 a year. We had invested a lot of money building hangar space but were told we would have to demolish or give the building back to the aerodrome upon cessation of the lease,” he said.

“I wasn’t going to pay for the demolition so just walked away and left the building there. The industry is struggling enough without these conditions being forced on operators. It’s putting the industry on its knees and you can see that by looking at the reduced aircraft at Cairns and the 30 per cent fall in staff numbers.”

Representatives at Bankstown could not be reached but North Queensland Airports’ chief executive Kevin Brown said the rents at Cairns Airport reflected the costs of building infrastructure, including runways, lighting and security, to support aircraft operations.
“In 2013 we reviewed all our general aviation charges to ensure we could continue to sustainably maintain our infrastructure and support aviation activity,” he said.

“As a result, general aviation landing and undesignated aircraft parking fees increased in late 2013 for the first time in 10 years to reach a level based on market value and comparable with other airports of similar size to Cairns. This review also brought undesignated aircraft parking into line with designated parking, which had already been set at market value for some time.”

Mr Brown said Cairns Airport consulted regular general aviation customers at length over the fee increases, which were introduced incrementally over the following three years to allow commercial operators time to adjust.

“There is no advantage in setting unrealistic rents as that does not attract business. Some operators did enjoy extremely low rents for many years, but as viable businesses they must be prepared to meet commercial reality. Leases are renewed on a case-by-case basis,” he said.

The criticisms come after the Aircraft Owners and Pilots ­Association last week released its Project Eureka report, a critique of aviation bureaucracies it claims are irreparably damaging general aviation businesses.

The wide-ranging review has a section dedicated to exploring the trend of increasing rents and criticising short-term leases that are been rolled out across Australia’s secondary airports, saying “no business in any industry can operate successfully without security of tenure for their operations”.

“Since the privatisation of the secondary airports there has been a decline in the security of tenure for aviation business. Ground lease periods have been reducing for aviation businesses while non-aviation business leases have increased,” the report said.

The report alleges that while Bankstown Airport had been offering 10-year leases to general aviation operators, much longer lease periods were being handed out to hardware stores, petrol stations, schools, bus companies and other non-aviation businesses.

“The intent of the Airports Privatisation Act was not to offer more secure tenure to non-aviation businesses,” the report says.

The report also alleges that since the airports have been privatised, airport landlords have been enforcing their rights to resume properties or improvements at the end of the lease period. This means that lessees have to demolish any improvements they have built on the land or hand over the improvements to the owner.

The Eureka report also claims exorbitant leasing fees and the encroachment of commercial property developments is resulting in a decline in aircraft movements from these airports.

“Bankstown Airport, the centre of the Australian GA industry in the 1980s, was the busiest airport in the southern hemisphere with over 550,000 aircraft movements per annum. It is now below 180,000,” the report says.

“Business parks can be established anywhere in cities where the appropriate zoning exists. The aviation industry needs runways to function and there are very few of these in the Australian capital cities. Without reasonable commercial access to the runways, we don’t have a GA industry.”

At Cairns Airport, however, the number of aircraft movements is on the rise according to Mr Brown.

“We are on track in FY2016 to see a significant jump in general aviation. In FY2010 there were 40,260 movements and in FY2015 there were 44,880. In FY2010 there were 40,666 general aviation movements and in FY2015 there were 46,852. This year our estimate is for 56,836 general aviation movements,” he said.

The Eureka report calls on the government to sell off its billion-dollar-a-year Airservices air traffic controller organisation to help fund a revival of the struggling general aviation sector.

It claims a full privatisation of Airservices could bring in as much as $4 billion, which could be split, with half going to the commonwealth to help claw back its budget deficit and the other half to establish a trust fund that could reinvest in the aviation industry to buy back secondary airports, spur job creation and increase the sector’s involvement in R&D.

“The current owners are not acting in the spirit of the Airport Sales Act, which was supposed to foster aviation activities. Instead, they are being run as a business park with rents benchmarked or based upon similar business parks in the surrounding areas,” the report said. “These statistics are reflected across Australia, clearly demonstrating the demise of an aviation industry caused by governments failing to enforce the Airports Privatisation Act.”

Infrastructure and Transport Minister Darren Chester has asked the Department of Infrastructure and Regional Development, with relevant government agencies, to examine the issues raised in Project Eureka and to prepare a response for the Minister’s consideration.

“The government continues to require compliance by federal airport operators with the provisions of the Airports Act and the terms of their airport leases. The government also notes that airport operators have made non-aeronautical land use and commercial developments on airport sites consistent with airports continuing to undertake their core aviation business,” a departmental spokesperson said

MTF...P2