Full steam Skipper? – not yet; but soon.
Here's your 'one' for today Rex, chew on this. - Back in the day, some chap with a beard and a walking ‘staff’ came down off some godforsaken mountain with a couple of stone tablets. Ten simple rules – that was all, the god de jure reckoned that was plenty of rules to see the world right and keep things on the square, the straight and the narrow. The quote below ain’t eloquent or even well drafted – but it does, much like the stone tablets, set down ten good guidelines for a starting off place – along the road to true reform. “We’ the people who pay for the politicians salaries, perks, little fiddles and general fiscal well being are becoming just a tad weary of the way things are done; or to be precise – ain’t done. The bloody aviation industry is in a hell of a state – a mess – simply because the politicians can’t get off their well fed beam ends and read the words below. What they scared of? The ‘Safety Boogie-man’? Well they should be – he was invented for the control of gutless, inutile, self serving, greedy useless bastards – by the agencies the politicians built to cover their sorry arse ends. Shame on the whole lot of you. One of the very few ‘dinkum’ things Australia had was the pride taken in providing aviation excellence. No longer – Reform the Act, rebuild ATSB and CASA, copy the FAA regulations; but above all – man up, grow a set. You take the money, kudos and pension don’t you? Well do the job properly, with a good heart or piss off back to the sheltered workshop that spawned you.
1. A regulation rewrite by a government body that has taken decades longer than anticipated and is still ongoing (and NZ who did similar achieved and implemented decades faster). At what cost? To achieve not a simpler system but a more arcane one.
2. An aviation industry that is struggling to survive. Closures of maintenance, charter and training organizations across the country. Loss of facilities, skills, corporate knowledge. Loss of public benefit that having a viable GA industry provides.
3. A shortage of pilots in the airlines. Australian flying schools disappearing and talk of having to get overseas pilots to fill vacancies because we are not able to train our own. We used to train not just our own pilots but large numbers of overseas pilots.
4. Regional aviation industries, jobs and services disappearing. Higher costs to regional residents for transport and closures of local business and loss of employers.
5. The body responsible for overseeing the industry keeps growing larger and is imposing more and more onerous restrictions on the industry and there is much doubt within the industry about the actual safety value of those restrictions.
6. Huge antipathy and distrust between the regulatory body and the industry it serves.
7. An industry in crisis that wants a regulatory body that includes in its charter some responsibility for assisting maintain the viability of the industry it serves instead of its current narrow focus on imposing regulation without any need to consider the practical impact of those regulations on the viability of the industry.
8. An industry whose health and viability depends on maintaining a high level of safety but that feels it is having onerous and often poorly thought out regulations imposed on it that are not so much about practical safety outcomes as the appearance and ease of enforcement by the regulator.
9. Governments over decades that have washed their hands and allowed the regulator to continue to act without regard for the viability of the industry because they are too scared to make decisions that may impact safety (or the perception of safety).
10 Handing over of commonwealth aviation assets that have served a vital role in the aviation industry (and its benefit to the community) to private hands who then develop and those assets to maximise their profits in ways that reduce or remove aviation from the facility.
Here's your 'one' for today Rex, chew on this. - Back in the day, some chap with a beard and a walking ‘staff’ came down off some godforsaken mountain with a couple of stone tablets. Ten simple rules – that was all, the god de jure reckoned that was plenty of rules to see the world right and keep things on the square, the straight and the narrow. The quote below ain’t eloquent or even well drafted – but it does, much like the stone tablets, set down ten good guidelines for a starting off place – along the road to true reform. “We’ the people who pay for the politicians salaries, perks, little fiddles and general fiscal well being are becoming just a tad weary of the way things are done; or to be precise – ain’t done. The bloody aviation industry is in a hell of a state – a mess – simply because the politicians can’t get off their well fed beam ends and read the words below. What they scared of? The ‘Safety Boogie-man’? Well they should be – he was invented for the control of gutless, inutile, self serving, greedy useless bastards – by the agencies the politicians built to cover their sorry arse ends. Shame on the whole lot of you. One of the very few ‘dinkum’ things Australia had was the pride taken in providing aviation excellence. No longer – Reform the Act, rebuild ATSB and CASA, copy the FAA regulations; but above all – man up, grow a set. You take the money, kudos and pension don’t you? Well do the job properly, with a good heart or piss off back to the sheltered workshop that spawned you.
1. A regulation rewrite by a government body that has taken decades longer than anticipated and is still ongoing (and NZ who did similar achieved and implemented decades faster). At what cost? To achieve not a simpler system but a more arcane one.
2. An aviation industry that is struggling to survive. Closures of maintenance, charter and training organizations across the country. Loss of facilities, skills, corporate knowledge. Loss of public benefit that having a viable GA industry provides.
3. A shortage of pilots in the airlines. Australian flying schools disappearing and talk of having to get overseas pilots to fill vacancies because we are not able to train our own. We used to train not just our own pilots but large numbers of overseas pilots.
4. Regional aviation industries, jobs and services disappearing. Higher costs to regional residents for transport and closures of local business and loss of employers.
5. The body responsible for overseeing the industry keeps growing larger and is imposing more and more onerous restrictions on the industry and there is much doubt within the industry about the actual safety value of those restrictions.
6. Huge antipathy and distrust between the regulatory body and the industry it serves.
7. An industry in crisis that wants a regulatory body that includes in its charter some responsibility for assisting maintain the viability of the industry it serves instead of its current narrow focus on imposing regulation without any need to consider the practical impact of those regulations on the viability of the industry.
8. An industry whose health and viability depends on maintaining a high level of safety but that feels it is having onerous and often poorly thought out regulations imposed on it that are not so much about practical safety outcomes as the appearance and ease of enforcement by the regulator.
9. Governments over decades that have washed their hands and allowed the regulator to continue to act without regard for the viability of the industry because they are too scared to make decisions that may impact safety (or the perception of safety).
10 Handing over of commonwealth aviation assets that have served a vital role in the aviation industry (and its benefit to the community) to private hands who then develop and those assets to maximise their profits in ways that reduce or remove aviation from the facility.