[Sandy Reith]

There’s been plenty of us making the same point about loss of Australian pilots who would migrate from General Aviation to our airlines. The trend has been clear for many years and other prominent authors such as Paul Phelan have seen the writing on the wall. All our efforts have gone for naught as successive National Party and Labor Ministers sat on their hands.

Of course the ‘independent’ Commonwealth corporate CASA, one of a proliferating class of statutory bodies unrestrained by regular Departmental norms, continues to claim ‘safety’ as the ultimate excuse. The excuse for the longest running rules rewrite in history, the excuse for this make work salary factory which has been left completely to it’s own devices and become thoroughly dysfunctional as burns up untold $billions. It’s spending is great for the highly paid employees with fat super, RDOs, stress leave, 7.5hr ‘working’ days and seminars to attend in northern hemisphere summers or perhaps for the lower ranks in QLD.

Until the Act is changed and Parliament realises the truth of the wrecking if a perfectly good GA industry we cannot look forward to any resurgence.

Mr. Carmody is obviously still at the behest of the Iron Ring, it’s truly a wonder he’s been able to go for some AVMED commonsense, even as a flawed concept it's better than nothing; as is, his proposal which will encourage pilots to drop their instrument ratings or not graduate to the higher and safer form of flight.

Being able to instruct on a Class 11 medical might help (but why not car driver standard?) but until we can have independent instructors not hampered by the incredibly costly and most useless Air Operators Certificate system no where near enough home grown pilots will be available for airlines.