I concur Lead Balloon, i actually like your introduction and will embed it. Below is a work in progess but would be keen on any feedback.
Dear (media representative)
#TheCanberraBubble has emerged as
the buzz term when it comes to describing Parliament House and the government’s apparent dysfunctional culture. Facing accusations of gender inequity in its ranks, a barrage of sexual assault and harassment claims, allegations of corruption, bullying and intimidatory behaviour, and public sentiment that Australia’s ruling bodies are ‘out of touch’ with the general population, the government stumbles along through scandal after scandal, often dragging the executive and judiciaries of our democracy with it.
In amongst the turmoil, in November 2020, the Senate Standing Committee’s General Aviation Inquiry, heard allegations of misfeasance in public office against (principally three) long-standing public servants from senior management at the Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA); including Shane Carmody, the then Director of Aviation Safety, Jonathan Aleck, Executive Manager of Legal, International and Regulatory Services, and Graeme Crawford, Manager of CASA’s Aviation Group. The same individuals that were the subject of an investigation by ABC 7.30 Report (Adele Ferguson and Chris Gillett - October 2018) into CASA’s behaviour in the matter of Bruce Rhoade’s fatal aircraft crash in January 2017 in Western Australia.
The forty minutes of testimony that Mr Glen Buckley, former Director of APTA (Australian Pilot Training Alliance) provided to the Senate Committee, is a snapshot, he alleges, of the depth of wrongdoing and abject failure of the safety regulatory authority to discharge its obligations to his company, the Australian public, and to the aviation industry. The impact of the alleged wrongdoing is substantial having resulted in a number of business closures, loss of associated jobs, and the loss of many millions of dollars to the entities affected.
Under the democratic principle of the ‘trias politica’ - the separation of powers - each arm of democracy (the parliament, the executive, and the judiciary) should have the power to govern, but also be kept in check by the power of the other arms. The democratic principle is the purposeful dissolution of power to ensure the integrity of all.
This principle, as demonstrated by Glen’s story detailed below, is not the modus operandi of CASA. In effect, a law unto itself, it develops the regulations, often as delegated legislation with no parliamentary oversight or control. It has absolute power to govern those regulations. It has the power to decide whether those regulations have been broken. And it has the power to decide the fate of those under its control. CASA, or more specifically, those in power within it, took a mere matter of months to destroy Glen’s 25-year flight-training career.
Aviation is weather dependent; and it is a brave aviator indeed that flies in ill weather. Glen’s story lays bare the actions of an industry regulator, primarily facilitated by those individuals at the helm, behaving like an ill wind to whomever it chooses. A regulator acting at personal will, and without tangible accountability.
With recent changes at CASA’s helm, perhaps now is the time for this story.
Aviation is one of the most regulated industries in the world. From the airline industry to general, sport and even unmanned aviation, no pilot or flight organisation escapes the rules. Rule number one is ‘Safety First’. Rule number two is See Rule One. Rule number three is Comply with Rule Number One and Rule Number Two at all cost. The economics of rules one and two are, for Australia’s Civil Aviation Safety Authority, not of paramount concern. With a pot of public money that pays no urgent heed of time, and a legal team to match, the organisation can focus on rules one and two with scant regard for rule three. It has the money and time to afford and protect its self-interests, and to take a far more measured and considered approach to its actions than the often cash-strapped tax-paying organisations that it oversees. Public perception that anyone involved in aviation is just a ‘rich dude with toys’, although occasionally true, is far from the front-line reality. General aviation in particular, maintenance providers, flight training schools, joy flight operators, private charter organisations, and the like, are, more truthfully, a labour of love.
And in Australia, Glen Buckley was one of those front-line tax-paying organisations labouring away at what he loved. A key general aviation industry participant, his Moorabbin-based, registered flight training organisation, Melbourne Flight Training, had an exemplary reputation, with a team of 25 employees and instructors, and included the necessary approvals to train overseas students. The school also had a safety record the envy of industry for the duration of its operation under his tenure. Glen was living the aviation dream. Glen was also respected by industry as an advocate for general aviation, publicly opposing the regulator on occasion, sometimes passionately.
In 2017, driven by CASA’s regulatory overhaul to the flight training organisation certification requirements, Glen used the opportunity to totally overhaul his businesess, The Australian Pilot Training Alliance, and his flying school of more than a decade. MFT impressing the industry, and, evidently, many in CASA. The business addressed industry’s economic concerns regarding the new administrative burdens without compromising rules one and two.
But, it seems, not everyone in CASA was happy with Glen.
From September 2018 to October 2019, Glen believes that key senior personnel from CASA launched an attack on the new business – and it went from ‘all systems go’ to ‘dead in the water’ in twelve months. Glen’s dream had crashed and burned. The organisation’s demise not due to poor management, economic mismanagement, a series of unfortunate events, an industry crisis or a financial crisis (historically the usual suspects) or even a one-in-a-hundred-year pandemic. APTA’s unravelling was insidious and defied logic, beginning with a single, devastating blow from the regulator itself, and then an unrelenting series of strategically-placed cuts. The full story has more twist and turns than an entire season of Dynasty, and, if Glen’s testimony is to be believed, points to a very sour problem with some past and present senior management of Australia’s aviation safety authority - CASA.
Below is Glen’s story.
An ill wind blows nobody any good.
The first inklings of a catastrophic storm building over Glen Buckley’s fertile patch of the aviation industry began a long time ago. In the early 2000s, CASA began drafting regulatory changes that would significantly alter the flight training school landscape in Australia. After more than a decade of development, it became clear to industry that the proposed legislation, although widely accepted as necessary, would cause significant and often prohibitive financial and regulatory burden on Australia’s grassroots flight-training organisations. Many of the schools likely to be most affected would be the quintessential Aussie ‘mum-and-dad’ businesses, time-poor and financially ill-equipped to afford the implementation and sustainment of the proposed weighty changes. Many of them did not survive, and many of those operated from regional and rural areas; their demise accelerating an historical overall decline in the General Aviation ecosystem in Australia that continues to this day.
At smaller than airline-industry airfields, no flight school means less aeroplanes flying on a regular basis. No aeroplanes regularly in the sky means less work for a maintenance facility. No maintenance facility means private pilots are less likely to hangar their aircraft at the airfield. Less private aircraft in hangars means less income for regional airfields, accelerating a weakening in investment and upkeep. Reduced airfield income means less aviation industry organisations drawn to the field due to lack of available industry services and potentially greater safety risks to aircraft, pilots, and passengers. Not a good outcome by any measure.
Further, a decline in the health of regional and rural airfields may mean private aircraft owners are forced onto metropolitan fields, where yes, facilities are available, but also increased hangarage demand. Flight training, too, would be forced to concentrate at metropolitan airfields. More flight-training and private aircraft owners at metropolitan airfields means more small aeroplanes and their (perceived) safety concerns, over dense suburbs. The changes proposed by CASA, according to Glen, held the potential to further degrade the aviation ecosystem and drive the system towards failures. To the viewing public, failure in aviation looks like aircraft accidents; prime-time viewing that the regulator, the government, and especially the industry, would rather avoid.
Glen had been in aviation for decades. He knew the system was a diaspora, a population geographically scattered, and that the whole was greater than the sum of its parts. Australia, the land of wide-open plains and rugged mountain ranges, relies on a web of remote, rural, regional, and metropolitan airfields. The health of the system relies on the people that work at, and on, those airfields. It relies on the organisations that fly from and to, those airfields. And, the industry relies on the regulator to govern the system; to ensure the safety of all the humans and the aircraft in the system and the public that use the system. But should the system rely on the regulator to manage the business concerns of those in the system? To the extent of its impact on air safety, perhaps. To the extent of deciding a business structure or model, perhaps not. Creating income in aviation is one thing, creating income safely, as is the foremost concern of all things aviation-regulated, is quite another, and the aviation industry is one of
the most-regulated industries around.
Although Glen’s business, Melbourne Flight Training, was metropolitan-based and as a standalone organisation stood to ultimately benefit from the demise of smaller, remote flight-training schools, Glen was never one to shy away from advocating for his beloved industry. He knew that, although at times factious and fractious, the entire industry relies on each part’s survival. He believed that many of the regional and more remote flight-training operators would not survive under the new regulations, and that the ripple of small failures would potentially disrupt the entire industry, creating a less safe environment for all.
More administrative staff, more paperwork, more reporting, meant less time in the air for instructors; less time doing the one thing that a flight-training business needed to survive; creating income and doing so with safety, not paperwork, dictating the time frame. Glen saw the incoming tsunami of paperwork, reporting and compliance costs looming darkly on his business’ horizon. He fought hard against the changes; his active and vocal opposition to the regulator’s legislative proposals is one of public record. Unfortunately, one that, it seems, would come back to haunt him.
Not known for complacency, Glen began thinking outside the box. How to build a business that would weather the impending storm? One that, as required by CASA, focussed on safety first but was still financially viable? Also never one to turn his back on others, Glen knew there could be strength in numbers, and it was from this premise that he turned his mind to creating a business with the following three elements:
1. Getting instructors into the aircraft and focussed on teaching the student (instruction creates income),
2. enlisting a team of specialists to perform the regulatory actions needed to fulfil CASA’s compliance requirements for all alliance members (a major expense), and simulatneously providing members access to a well funded safety department.
3. spreading the administrative expense of compliance across more than one organisation, significantly reducing the expense of 2 to each alliance member.
The industry knew that the old system had its flaws; the ‘lending’ of Air Operator’s certificates, and the ‘borrowing’ of instructors from other off-site flight-training organisations in adhoc scenarios, that, in reality, afforded both companies no real safety oversight. Operators did this because their organisation simply couldn’t afford, or didn’t have the amount of work for, a full-time Chief Instructor, a full-time Safety Officer, or a designated administrator. Many rural operators simply couldn’t attract qualified personnel to rural areas to ensure continued operations.
The current rules for flying school operations and the control of flying schools were hopelessly outdated and written before the advent of mobile phones and the internet. Quite simply the rules were decades behind the advances in technology.It was, for the most part, why CASA was changing the rules.
[AS3] And, they were wielding a big stick; change to the new rules before 1 September 2017, or being forced into closure after that date.
Glen understood that CASA was driving change to address what it saw as a failure of the system. But he also believed that CASA had adopted a safety-at-
all-cost attitude, a cost many organisations would not be able to afford. The new regulations significantly increased the burden, requiring unacceptable diversion of resources, to tasks that did nothing to improve safety or quality outcomes,Glen, however, sensed the situation had a potential win-win for the regulator and for the industry; a chance for organisations to operate in a way that made the adhoc system safer; transparent, documented, stable,
and more efficient without the consequences of business-failures and their inevitable detrimental effects on the aviation ecosystem. The system involved organisations working collaboratively to increase safety and compliance. Together the organisations had access to the largest safety department of any flying school in Australia.
So, as the saying goes, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Glen contacted CASA and put forward his concept. CASA welcomed Glen’s model with open arms, even so far as to allocate many hundreds of hours of CASA personnel to assist in its development; a total of ten employees from CASA over the course of two years were meaningfully involved. Back and forth between Glen and CASA went the model; information, advice, revisions, amendments, and paperwork for 600 requirements, slowly working towards the definitive document (the Exposition) that would allow his new business to operate. Given the business model was not too different from the current practices of larger flight training organisations, and what he was doing was simply formalising what many in the industry were already doing that CASA had previously tacitly sanctioned, Glen trusted the governing authority to act in good faith. Even to the extent of providing the regulator with commercial-in-confidence documents such as the proposed business contracts for alliance members. Glen was incredibly grateful for the professional assistance and advice of CASA in developing his Exposition.
With CASA well and truly on board, and after an investment of hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own money, Glen (and CASA) had built APTA; The Australian Pilot Training Alliance. CASA hadn’t simply been consulted, APTA had been built on approved CASA material, on hours and hours of extensive consultation, on good faith and mutual aims. Every one of the many hundreds of procedures was fleshed out with CASA personnel, assessed by CASA personnel, and signed off by CASA personnel, before undergoing a peer review within CASA. The system gaining full CASA approval in April of 2017.
It is also well known that CASA has an active and eager legal department; Legal, International & Regulatory Affairs. CASA employees do not make big decisions autonomously and without context; there are processes and approvals and implications to be considered. When CASA makes a decision, it makes an informed decision. A
very well-informed decision. It would be remiss to not stress this enough. CASA is an organisation of educated, well-informed, aviation and legal personnel whose ultimate purpose is to ensure the safety of pilots and public. The organisation takes its responsibility to oversee safety in the aviation industry very seriously, at whatever, it considers necessary, cost.
But CASA didn’t simply advise and consult and provide quality information through its wide-angle legal-context lens to Glen over those two years of development; CASA also recommended a number of rural and regional flight training organisations that would benefit from being a part of APTA. Alliances were forged, organisations joined the cause, CASA appeared to be smiling down upon it all; APTA was set to be a working model. Five organisations, one administrative setup, expensive expert personnel employed to fulfil CASA’s new compliance and safety requirements, and an IT system that provided 360-degree oversight of flight safety, all using CASA-provided manuals and compliance systems. Of note, is that the system was set up so that CASA could, at any point, log onto and
be an active part of the system. At any moment CASA could see exactly what APTA was doing in relation to flight training, from flight and aircraft records to staff training, communications, and instruction delivery. A first for the flight training industry, providing total transparency, full oversight, and all with CASA’s blessing.