I’m always genuinely grateful when Vag277 posts, because the content usually provides an insight into why the aviation regulatory ‘reform’ program continues to produce ever more complexity which CASA continues to defend.
Australia has a “different legislative environment” than the USA and the USA has “a media less obsessed with people dying as a result of personal decisions”. That may be so, but neither of those circumstances has any causal connection with the objective risks to aviation safety nor the ways in which those risks would objectively be mitigated in a cost-effective way.
More legislation is very rarely the solution to real-world problems, especially in aviation safety where there remain very few circumstances that are not already dealt with by a plethora of rules. And media sensationalism may result in pressure on politicians, but – surely – an independent regulatory authority would ignore such pressure. Surely?
But scratch the surface and what do we see in the wake of e.g. the Mount Gambier Angel Flight tragedy? ‘Somebody’ has to do ‘something’. Some new law ‘must’ be made. Rather than resist, the regulator capitulated. Non-existent safety cases and spun statistics are relied upon to justify further restrictions upon the defenceless. It’s just a political knee-jerk dressed up in safety rhetoric. And the regulator wouldn’t know and couldn’t care less if people who would otherwise have been carried on ‘community service flights’ die in a collision on the road or suffer deteriorating health at home rather than face the long road trips.
To a hammer, ever problem is a nail. To an organisation that makes laws, issues certificates and licences, grants approvals and permissions and exemptions and imposes conditions and restrictions, every problem requires new laws requiring – for a fee of course – a certificate or a licence or an approval or a permission or an exemption or… And it ‘helps’ that endless consultation processes and tapping away at the legislative keyboard keeps the regulator in lucrative busy-work, indefinitely.
If the regulator’s going to succumb to pressure arising from “media obsessed with people dying as a result of personal decisions”, the regulator has forgotten or is ignoring why it was created.