I thought you were Lead Balloon. In any event...
E D A yada yada yada. Call it what you like. If you're happy with jets mixing it in VMC E doing IFR Pickups and Dropdowns, throw in a VFR or two effectively NORDO, half of them yakking on Comm 2 on the CTAF trying to organise a landing sequence, all the while Seeing And Avoiding, be my guest. All I'll say is thank God for TCAS and the Big Sky Theory.
One of my compatriots flew in the US on RPT CRJs. He said almost every regional airport he went to had a tower.
Yet...
That’s precisely what happens every day in Australian G. HCRPT in and out of aerodromes with no tower, while yakking on the CTAF and seeing and avoiding.
The response of some on this thread to the MNG tragedy seems in effect to be: We must retain G!
My personal opinion is more extensive use of class E to utilise the increased surveillance available would provide a sound net increase in safety for IFR aircraft. However I have absolutely no real evidence to back that up and I have not personally seen class E utilised in the way some are suggesting here.
As for the resistance to class E in Australia, I think it may be a combination of most pilots don’t actually understand it, the obvious implementation of it (Avalon) was done quite poorly, and there is resistance to it from airlines as well as CASA and ASA. I don’t know how to solve those problems.
Difficult to know where to start with all that.
There is evidence about the risk of operations in Class E. Millions of cubic kilometres of it and millions of movements through it over many decades. Yes: there have been mid airs in it, just as there will eventually be a mid air in Australian C.
Most pilots I know understand how E is supposed to work. And it works as it is supposed to work in almost all of the places in Australia where it’s been designated. The Avalon dog’s breakfast is a tiny percentage of E in Australia and is the product of a combination of factors some of which have nothing to do with objective risk and cost effective risk mitigation.
Resistance to Class E from CASA and ASA? Errrrmmm...they are the only organisations which have had the power to designate airspace for the last few decades! First Airservices, now CASA.
If CASA and ASA don’t like E, why did they designate it? It wasn’t the Giant Flying Spaghetti Monster that designated it.
If CASA and ASA don’t like the E at Avalon, why is it still there? Why all this pussy-footing around? Wouldn’t Airservices have already “recommended” to CASA that CASA do its job, and wouldn’t CASA have been happy to “act” on that “recommendation”?
A suggestion as to what’s going on, if I may: There are differences of opinion within Airservices about the risks of Class E airspace. There are differences of opinion within CASA about the risks of Class E airspace. There are differences of opinion within the pilot population about the risks of Class E airspace. In a sensible and coherent airspace designation system, those opinions would be disregarded in favour of what happens in the real world: There would be assessments of objective risks and the costs of the available mitigations of those risks. There would be data. Numbers. $$$ figures. But as Sunfish pointed out, there is nothing like that in the review of the Avalon airspace. Instead: waffle, and the bizarre spectacle of the regulator (CASA OAR) in effect recommending to the regulated (Airservices) that the regulated make a recommendation to the regulator. I suggest that when this kind of bizarre behavior occurs, there’s more at play than just “the safety of air navigation”. Much more.