Derfred, I agree with the first two paragraphs of your post 57, but unfortunately your third paragraph really goes downhill. It says:
“CASA needs to decide the rules, using safety as the most important consideration …"
Yes, it probably “needs” to do that if it is going to comply with the Act, but in practice, clearly there are many cases when CASA does not decide the rules using safety as the most important consideration. There are times when it uses the marketplace as the most important consideration – as I have said in previous posts.
You state that “CASA is invested in affordable safety”, yet for some reason they like to deny this. Try to get someone within CASA to actually say the words “affordable safety.”
I think many have this belief that the Australian public are so stupid they can’t be informed as to the different levels of safety that are provided under the regulations. Of course these different levels depend on affordability. If we tried to have full FAR25 airline standard aircraft operating to Bourke, the cost of the air tickets would be too high and the service would stop.
You say an argument around ETOPS or EDTO is not a good test case in this particular matter. The reason we have these twin engine operations is not because CASA decided to make the decision, it is because the decision was made in Europe and the USA. Whether people at CASA wanted to differ was not the deciding factor. They simply had to harmonise with what the rest of the world was doing – or become a laughing stock.
I would imagine Boeing went to the FAA and said words to the effect, “We can get a lot more people flying if you would approve twin engine operation over remote areas, and we can make the aircraft acceptably safe.” The FAA no doubt saw the common sense logic in this. Fortunately, the FAA doesn’t have legislation which says that safety has to be “the most important consideration.” They realise there needs to be a balance between safety and participation levels.
That is what this thread is about. It is great to see that people are becoming better informed after just about every post.
If I worked for CASA I would be proud to say that there are a number of different levels of regulated safety based on the ethos of getting as many people as possible going by air travel which is safer than the road.