Pete, you are, of course technically correct about your commercial pilot. I believe I am also technically correct in stating that two VFR into IMC accidents involving Angel Flight in their Ten years of operation is statistically insignificant and is not a basis on which CASA or ATSB or anyone else for that matter, can draw meaningful conclusions about AF’s safety compared to the private pilot population, especially since the ATSB data is skewed by the vast volume of training flights.
My hunch would be that if you eliminated that data and compared apples with apples, Angel Flight would come out way ahead in the safety stakes. I’m not sure meaningful conclusions could be drawn comparing charter, air work or low density RPT either.
The ATSB analysis of “occurrences” is crap not worth a mention.
I thus believe that talking about the alleged “pressures” on Angel Flight pilots as if they were real and not already being mitigated by Angel Flight has no basis in fact.
Furthermore, that means that both CASA and ATSB are being dishonest in their conclusions and actions against community service flights for purely political reasons.
If we wanted to test the hypothesis that AF pilots are frequently running unmitigated risks, then my suggestion would be to have one or two IFR equipped aircraft and commercial pilots on call and see how many times AF pilots bail during an operation and avail themselves and their pax of that backup service.
Going way back to the 1970’s, I designed and built a system for Ansett and CAA to monitor the entire airline fleet - looking for safety trend anomalies in maintenance and aircraft reliability to ensure that both Ansett and CAA were identifying and investing their time and money in investigating real safety issues and not just reacting to random failures. It appears ATSB and CASA are not interested in data driven investigations any more.