Younger people may not agree but are we reaching the end of an safety era?
The years since WW2 have seen a generation of pilots brought up in a system where flying the aeroplane was paramount. They have come to terms with the new era where they get to monitor the aeroplane and enjoy the automatic help they get to complete the constant intellectual exercises of flying, navigating, and communicating; but the intellectual exercise is still going on in their brains...
Furthermore the people they are training are required to meet these age-old standards or they don't get to sit in the left hand seat.
Are the less well developed areas of the world, where flying was never the seat of the pants job, showing us a new failure mode?
Why does a flight instrument failure (yet to be confirmed) put a brand new aircraft into the ocean? How do two aircraft recently end up in the water short of their respective runways?
Can we, in Australia, hang onto those "master pilot" skills when the industry wants the equivalent of the unmanned ore trains in West Australia?
We may have reached a point on the airliner evolutionary stage when the aeroplane can do just enough to make everyone complacent, but not enough to not require a human to intervene when the FMS runs out of (pre-programmed) ideas.
The car industry is facing similar issues with driverless cars, how long before we start to see - I thought the car was driving itself - accidents?
Sorry I don't have the answers but I also don't think it is anything to do with CASA. We are the custodians of the standards, we should ensure we do not cut corners, we should report anybody that does.
In the end the buck stops with everyone of us who is in a position of accountability in the industry.
If you are young remember what an old man once told me "we have to teach the old blokes to trust the automation, and the young blokes not to trust it"