The CASA processes, procedures and policies on ‘upgrading’ from charter to RPT are here:
http://www.casa.gov.au/avreg/business/aoc_app/index.htm
Bushy – The distinctions drawn in CAR 206 itself have got nothing to do with safety. It’s all the other rules that do that. For example, an aircraft that is being used, or is to be used, by the holder of an Air Operator's Certificate which authorises the use of that aircraft for RPT, is a “class A aircraft” under the Regs and must therefore be maintained under a system of maintenance approved under Reg 39. There’s a bunch of other rules compliance with which make RPT comparatively safer that Charter. It’s consequently more expensive to set up and run, which is why so many at the fringes try to find loopholes.
Of course the poor pax don’t know about or understand the implications of the distinction, but who cares about them. (Torres can fill you in on the history of supplemental airlines and all that stuff about defeating the tyranny of distance in a wide brown land where things like RPT standard aerodromes were simply impractical.)
Don’t blame CASA for the
original content of CAR 206. It’s merely the moldering remnants of ANR 191, which was made many moons before CASA was a gleam in a Minister’s advisor’s eye. However, CASA’s abject failure to repeal and replace it, notwithstanding the outcomes of the Seaview Commission of Inquiry, and notwithstanding the 8 or so years and endless millions that CASA’s Standards Division has had to do it, would in other times be scandalous. But who cares anymore?
Plovett: you’d have to ask the AAT about that. My understanding of Blue Sky is that sometimes the exercise of a statutory power in breach of a requirement applying to the exercise will render the decision void, and in other cases, voidable. I’m not sure it’s got anything to do with working out what CAR 206 means. But you’re always welcome to run it past the High Court.
Apache: the fake travel agency (as opposed to an arm’s length one) is probably the second oldest ploy to get around 206/191. Buying ‘shares’ in the aircraft before the flight, thereby turning the flight into a private one by the ‘owners’, is probably the oldest. The one the subject of the AAT decision above was the one created to get around governments’ (note the apostrophe after the “s”) decision to cease maintaining aerodromes – Torres can fill you in on the history. CASA had some policy on the issue, but it’s all too hard, so doesn’t bother any more.