[P7_TOM]

Sunfish – Winner, winner: Chicken dinner.  Jan 2015.

The Demise Of Aviation Industry In Australia Is Now A Lot Closer.

Skidmore has just proclaimed himself to be a fellow traveler who won’t make waves or attempt to change the course of Aviation regulation in Australia. That can only be bad for the entire industry from Qantas all the way downwards for reasons I will explain below. Dick Smith is also right about the “affordable safety” although the use of that term is unfortunate. I will explain that as well.

Let’s start with the Senate report: That cataloged the failures of aviation regulation and made the most serious charge possible against a public service anywhere of any kind: – a total lack of trust of the regulator by the industry, in other words a breakdown of any constructive relationship between regulator and regulated.

Additional to this is the breakdown of trust with CASA’s partners Air Services Australia and the Australian Transport Safety Bureau who are joined by memorandums of understanding [MOU] to CASA and cooperate in its malfeasance, as evidenced by the disgraceful ATSB report into the ditching of the Pel-AIr aircraft. In addition, thanks to Karen Casey’s law suit, we now find that there appears to be a web of corruption involving political donations by Pel-Airs owners to political parties who then lent upon CASA and ATSB. This has all the features of what is termed Crony Capitalism – you scratch my back, I scratch yours.

The characteristic of Crony Capitalism is that rules are bent to suit your mates and the legislative preamble of the Aviation Act:  - “establish a regulatory framework for maintaining, enhancing and promoting the safety of civil aviation, with particular emphasis on preventing aviation accidents and incidents”  is what facilitates this because “safety” is a nominative, it can mean anything you like it to mean. It is this sentence that facilitates the entirety of CASAs bastardisation of Australian Aviation – CASA is always chasing “safety”, a will-o’-the- wisp, which means that what CASA calls unsafe practices for one pilot or operator are perfectly reasonable for another.

The impact of Crony Capitalism is that investment in the industry diminishes since no investor can secure himself against sovereign risk – that the regulator is going to take a’gin you for some reason and destroy your investment and capital, as CASA has demonstrably done time and again. Lack of investment means lack of jobs and growth in the industry and overall, Australia suffers.

Mark Skidmore has, by his own words, refused to redefine “safety” in practical terms and will thus allow the bastardisation and embuggerance of the industry to continue on his watch, no matter what his, no doubt good, intentions may be.

Dick Smith is right about “affordable safety” but seems to not understand what this means in practical terms, and the spineless jellyfish in ATSB who could have been the enablers in such a process are silent.

Importance of Risk Management:

The practical name for achieving “Safety” is “risk management”. This discipline is at least Forty years old, I was taught it on my first job with an oil company. It involves the quantification of risk and the cost of accidents, followed by a determination of what it would cost to mitigate the risk followed by a straightforward cost benefit analysis.

Risk management is not rocket science, it is well understood. It is the basis for rule making by other regulators (notably the FAA).  The ATSB can produce most of the statistics for its implementation off the top of its head and the industry has the rest. What it does require is for a Government to decide what an acceptable level of risk is for various classes of Aviation: “One in a Million”? “One in Twenty million”?

Again there are international metrics for this stuff to guide us and most of the world, except Australia, benchmarks their aviation sectors against these metrics every year. Just redefine “Safety” in the preamble of the Act and everything else Dick Smith requires will follow.

Responsibility:

However it now appears certain that nobody in Government on either side of politics has the guts to become accountable for anything, let alone aviation safety, and this provides a perfect opportunity for the parasites that are CASA, ATSB and AsA and their corrupt business partners to milk what is left of the industry for all they are worth to satisfy their bloated egos, lust for power and of course the money.

Outcomes:

Need I add that the final outcome of this situation is to make the industry as a whole much less safe and ultimately lead to a series of catastrophic accidents?

Sunny (slightly edited) called this, spot on, six months ago.  Really have to agree with the majority of (dare I say it) ‘Stakeholders’; Skidmore is an waste of time, space and money; simply put, not up to the job that needs to be done; or, as the boys say - NFI.  That is the closest I can come to any sort of formal analysis.

Tim Tam Sunny; no, have two; just for being correct six long, boring, now wasted months ago.  Bravo - that man.....