In 2016, CASA conducted a sector risk profile for this sector. It found that the charter accident rate is eleven times higher than public transport (RPT) based on analysis of data from 2006 to 2013. The average annual cost of accidents and fatalities was estimated to be about $15.3 million. The leading accident category was collision with terrain and a common contributor was ineffective or inadequate monitoring and checking.
Let us make this (very big and almost certainly invalid) assumption: CASA’s ‘sector risk profile’ was based on valid statistics and methodologies.
Making that assumption, the next question should be: What, if anything, can be done to causally and cost-effectively reduce the number of accidents and fatalities in the ‘charter sector’?
I can tell you what the answer is
not. The answer is
not an ever-more complex regulatory regime with ever-more interactions with an opinionated regulator.
All those accidents and incidents occurred during the never-ending story of the regulatory ‘reform’ program, during which the ‘charter sector’ had the ‘benefit’ of the wonderful regulatory mosaic that CASA continues to defend and reinforce.
For all the increasing complexity, for all the cost, for all the destruction it continues to leave in its wake, the regulatory ‘reform’ program and CASA’s administration of it still spits out pilots who don’t understand the implications of what’s written on a f*cking maintenance release, even assuming they bother reading it.