[Peetwo]

Via AOPA Oz:

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PROFESSIONALS AUSTRALIA: CASA IN CRISIS

October 7, 2020 By Benjamin Morgan



A discussion paper released by Professionals Australia, a union representing employees of the Civil Aviation Safety Authority, has labeled CASA as being in a state of crisis, highlighting serious deficiencies in technical knowledge and capability.


The paper identified five key issues;

1. Staffing::Technical teams are chronically short-staffed and there is an effective freeze on recruitment;
   
   
   
2. Workloads:  Understaffing is intensifying workloads among a shrinking pool of technical professionals.
   
   
   
3. Training and currency:  Technical workgroups are being deskilled as a result of alack of currency training and professional development.
   
   
   
4. Restructuring and procedural change:  CASA are hollowing out the technical elements of many roles via restructuring and changing procedures which limit the opportunity to conduct technical work and oversight.
   
   
   
5. Poor engagement and loss of confidence: CASA fails to take the concerns of technical staff seriously, convinced that the direction that executive are taking the organisation in is sound.  Staff engagement and confidence in leadership is at an all-time low.
   

The discussion paper took into consideration recent surveys conducted by the Australian Public Service Sensus, Professional Australia and other unions, finding that CASA staff have lost faith in their leadership as a result of the culmination of these issues. Serious action is required to restore that faith and repair workplace culture.


Click to download the full Professionals Australia Discussion Paper
Click to download a copy of the Australian Public Service Sensus survey of CASA

ChocFrog nomination comment of the week...

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Mark Newton It’s a bit of a strange document.

Claims of understaffing can be taken with a grain of salt: CASA’s budget appropriation in 2019-20 was $198 million and they added more than 70 bureaucrats, even though aviation activity in Australia didn’t grow.

The claim that technical capabilities are being hollowed out is questionable too, because CASA isn’t a technical organization anymore. Airworthiness is handled by industry, navaids and airspace is handled by Air Services Australia, airports are handled by local councils and a plethora of private consultants, airlines are essentially self-regulated via expositions with mostly light touch CASA oversight. Perhaps if technical staff are feeling unloved they could go and find real jobs somewhere else?

CASA has two (and, for all intents and purposes, only two) functions.

The first function is to recommend and draft safety regulations for promulgation into law by their Minister.

The second function is to administer the Act and its subordinate regulations.

Those two functions are linked: If CASA’s first function manages to cause regulations to pass into law which have a high administrative burden requiring additional procedures and staff to run, then CASA’s second function will need to obtain a larger budget appropriation, hire new bureaucrats and create more red tape to run them.

So if CASA’s staff are upset about being overworked or underappreciated, the obvious response is to persuade them to write better, simpler, smaller, lower-cost regulations.

Because the ONLY place their workload comes from is their own administrative requirements caused by the regulations they’ve written!

As long as they keep making rods for their own backs in they way they have been, we can all feel pretty relaxed about how unhappy they are with the result. “Doctor, it hurts when I do this!” “Well stop doing it, then!”

As soon as they work that out, the better off everyone will be.

They’re about to get a new DAS. Some of their senior leadership isn’t far off retirement (eg how many years does Aleck have left in him?)

CASA is standing at a fork in the road. If they want to change direction, now is a good time to do it.

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&..

Matt Jacobs Don't casa run medical to? Or are they separated now as well?

Mark Newton They “run” it to the extent that they second-guess the DAMEs.

But with Class 2 Basic, do they really need to do it anymore?

Why not just devolve the class 1 and class 3’s 100% to DAMEs with some light oversight, and get out of private medicals altogether like the yanks and brits have?

Unify all private medicals, including the RAAus ones, under a single standard based on a GP physical.

Instantly cuts out about half of CASA’s involvement in medicals, and makes GA happy at the same time.

That’s an example of what I mean about CASA having two functions:

Medicals require CASA involvement for no reason other than the fact that they wrote rules which say they need CASA involvement. If they wrote the rules to require lighter-touch involvement, or no involvement, or different involvement, then AVMED would have a different (smaller) job to do.

AVMED is part of the second function I described. The only reason they have any workload at all is because the first function wrote regulations which give them work to do.

I don’t need to involve my State RTA to get a drivers license medical; They’ve devolved that responsibility to GPs via the AusRoads standard. There’s no earthly reason why CASA can’t write and publish an aviation equivalent of AusRoads, hand it off to GPs to administer, and get the hell out of medical assessment altogether.

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MTF...P2