Currawong is entitled to his "Opinions", good grief our whole industry is governed by opinions, our regulations are written in such a way that the opinions of the governors is paramount. Try arguing with an FOI over a safety issue some time, your opinion means nothing to them other than a nuisance they will not tolerate.
Its the way these things get inflicted upon us that rankles.
Someone within the ruling class has a brain fart and puts forward their opinion. Does anyone within the bureaucracy do risk analysis? cost analysis?examine other jurisdictions? Is the proposal fit for purpose?
An ASIC will not in any way prevent a determined terrorist from committing mayhem even with ASIC. There are far easier means at their disposal for committing mayhem than aviation, a forty ton semi into lunchtime crowd for example. Do all truck drivers require an ASIC?
I imagine a cost analysis by a bureaucrat would largely be "what's it going to cost us to implement" against "how much return can we gouge to recover that cost with a tidy profit or an income stream for someone, as they say "a nice little earner".There would be very little consideration of the impact on those they are inflicting their brain fart on.
The country with the largest aviation industry in the world has not been inflicted with an ASIC requirement, even after suffering the most grievous aviation related terrorist act.
I have heard many opinions around the industry on how an ASIC could be made more useful and thus less onerous and perhaps a better tool for those who monitor security. One I heard was to include biometric data on the card with the ability to swipe it to open access to GA ramps at airports, thus recording who and when someone accessed the ramp. The flaw of course would be a stolen ASIC could be used, that risk could be negated by a pin code assigned to each card entered for each swipe.
Then again all of that could be accommodated in a pilots licence with photo ID along with everyones licence details such as ratings etc, rather that the back to the future paper document we have to lug around now.
As far as Currawong's opinion goes I respectfully disagree, the ASIC is not fit for purpose, there are other less onerous and less expensive ways to achieve the allusion of security.
Regarding DAMP.
I have been told more than thirty million dollars was expended to implement it, just for the regulator alone. A lot of money to address a risk that may or may not have existed. Does a DAMP manual of biblical proportions prevent or deter a determined alcoholic pilot? How many alcoholic pilots are out there? In my career I have known many pilots who like a beer, I've never encountered one who flew under the influence, then again I'm probably naive.
I've never quite understood why, other than to add some income to testing facilities, a pre-employment drug and alcohol test is required. To prove what? At that time, on that day someone was sober? I know people can be stupid but it's beyond stupid to turn up for a known test under the influence.
Could just the threat of random testing achieve the same deterrent effect without the complicated extremely expensive DAMP system?