"Letter to Don"
Folks,
"The GV" style and content sound awfully familiar to me??
Quote: "Mary Schiavo who was the head of the FAA, was asked about a tricky incident on a technology issue when Fly -by-wire was being introduced."
Actually, Mary (Scary Mary) Schiavo NEVER worked at the FAA, let alone as the Administrator, and I suggest you take the rest of the "letter to my son" with a certain degree skepticism.
If you don't want to read the GV epistle, I will summarise:
Back in the halcyon days of the Department of Civil Aviation every little thing in Australian aviation was perfect, we had the wold's best air safety record, (which we didn't) costs were irrelevant, and if only those interfering politicians and their supporters had kept their noses out, and "the industry" had been kept in its proper place by the DCA Experts (X-Sperts) like GV, there would be none of the modern (really, are they so new??) aviation problems.
Just a couple of additional comments, like so may critics don't, GV doesn't understand the difference between between "self-regulation" and "self-administration".
The depiction of the Christmas 1999 fuel contamination crisis is almost funny in its depiction of what CASA did or didn't do, CASA did ground just about everything in sight.
Yep!!, There are all sorts of things wrong with Government(s) in Australia, and CASA in particular, but that was a lot of words to say not very much.
Tootle pip!!
PS: As I have written elsewhere, read "The New Despotism" for an explanation of the behavior of the bureaucracy (aka: Executive Government) in the Westminster system, and this was 1920s, and the birth of the aviation bureaucracy in Australia. "Hewart's Law" is highlighted below. Fits CASA to a T.
Wikipedia: The New Despotism is a book written by the
Lord Hewart,
Lord Chief Justice of England, and published in 1929 by
Ernest Benn Limited. Hewart described this "new despotism" as
"to subordinate Parliament, to evade the Courts, and to render the will, or the caprice, of the Executive unfettered and supreme".
[1] The evasion of the Courts referred to increasing quasi-judicial decision-making by the civil service and the subordination of Parliament which resulted from the growth of delegated legislation.