Glen Buckley and Australian small business -V- CASA

[glenb]

My Proposed Media Release for Monday 09/09/19

MEDIA RELEASE

CASA Bullying Small Business

Glen Buckley had a vision to build the most professional Flight Training School in Australia. For the past 15 years he had been working virtually non- stop growing his new business, a task that required a 24/7 commitment to make it happen. Melbourne Flight Training (“MFT”) in fact became one of Victoria’s busiest schools; was thriving as a domestic and international flight training school with an impressive array of accreditations and delivering industry-leading levels of both safety and compliance.

Then along comes the Civil Aviation Safety Authority (“CASA”) and decides to reinvent the wheel.It formulates changes to the Legislation for pilot training organisations known as Parts 61, 141 & 142. In late 2016 CASA finally introduced its “new regulatory program” a decade behind schedule, and hundreds of millions of dollars over budget.

Not surprisingly, CASA underestimated the workload required by each of the Flying Schools in completing the tasks. The Schools had to attend to over 600 new requirements. Each had to be individually assessed by CASA personnel. It took years and required CASA to work extensively side by side with the respective organisations, to ensure that all the “i’s were dotted and the t’s crossed”.

The ramifications were significant on Australia’s 350 flight training schools. CASA unrealistically sets September 2017 as the deadline for the conversion to Part 142 & 142 by all applicable flying schools.

Working with CASA, Glen took an innovative and collaborative approach to the expensive new regulatory structure, enthusiastically embracing the change. He called his system the Australian Pilot Training Alliance (“APTA”).

During the design of APTA, he insisted it must:

· Increase safety
· Increase regulatory compliance
· Protect the Australian Owned sector of the industry
· Have a an altruistic component and support struggling aero clubs in regional areas
· Create jobs.


As the CASA stipulated deadline of September 2017 approached, it was obvious that CASA was seriously under resourced, accordingly Glen requested CASA to allocate more resources to his own organisation, which was ready and waiting to “Transition”. CASA provided the resources, and APTA was proudly one of the first to be approved by CASA in April of 2017, approximately 4 months ahead of the deadline.

Unlike APTA, as the deadline of September 2017 approached and past, the vast majority of the schools (circa 95%) had not been able to complete the process to the Part 142 requirements of the new legislation.

CASA did not have the resources required for processing, and at the last minute CASA extended the deadline by a further 12 months to September 2018.

This was a major setback to those organisations that had made the significant time and financial investment to comply with the Parts, including Glen’s own business APTA.Nevertheless, APTA continued to grow and was exceptionally well received by the industry.

Then after 15 years of safe and compliant operations, the last 18 months of which was in the new CASA required Part 141 & 142 format, without prior warning in October 2018 a number of restrictions were placed on APTA’s ability to trade, in that CASA:

· Placed a “limited approval of operations” that has been as short as a minute-by-minute approval, and no longer than 90 days.
· Made allegations against APTA that prevented it from marketing its product.
· Prevented APTA taking on customers.
· Refused to renew existing capabilities as they expired
· Prevented APTA adding on capabilities.

Critically, these actions were not taken on the basis of safety or regulatory compliance, and the effects have been traumatic for Glen and for his business. The CASA action has now caused the closure of three businesses, with the associated loss of jobs. Glen has lost his home, his business, his savings, and is now fighting relentlessly to protect his reputation

So, unexpectedly APTA went from being the “hero” of Part 141 & Part 142 Transitioning to having its approval virtually withdrawn. To this day Glen is at a loss as to the reason why his world was turned upside down.

He has elected to fight back on this matter, gaining a groundswell of opinion and support from the aviation industry and fair-minded people. His complaints have been sent as high as the Prime Minister’s office including substantive ethical allegations against 4 personnel within CASA that impact on the safety of aviation in Australia, and go to the very core of good governance in CASA.

The matter is gaining significant momentum. More than 200,000 views by industry peers, on a website referred to as Pprune. https://www.pprune.org/australia-new-zealand-pacific/620219-glen-buckley-australian-small-business-v-casa.html

A Crowd Funding page has been established on his behalf, with $18,000 in donations raised within 48 hours for Glen to mount a legal case against CASA.

The site is experiencing strong support, with many comments from donors indicating the high level of emotion credited to this matter. https://www.gofundme.com/f/glen-buckley-v-casa

This is a matter that is not going away. It is growing rapidly, and gaining wide industry support.One supporter said “CASA has a bottomless pit of taxpayer money; Glen has none, only us!

MEDIA RELEASE:Glen Buckley[phone]
[email protected]