Part 4
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. However, after more than a decade of development, it became clear to industry that the proposed legislation, although widely accepted as necessary, would place significant and often prohibitive financial and regulatory burdens 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.
These regional aero clubs also provide an important social role, bringing together people from regional areas to engage and share common interests and passions.
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 general aviation 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 aviation ecosystem relies on the people that work at, and on, those airfields, and their businesses. The aviation industry relies on the regulator to govern that system; to ensure the safety of all the humans and the aircraft in it and the public that use it. But should the system allow that the regulator manages the business concerns of those within it? 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, at Moorabbin, 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 a ripple of small failures held the potential to 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.
The new regulations demanded an unacceptable diversion of already stretched resources to tasks unrelated to improving safety or quality outcomes. Glen saw the incoming administrative burden and associated 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 for Glen, it seems, his record 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 an alliance of businesses with the following elements:
1. Improving aviation safety by bringing a number of operators together to cohesively share safety information, and to develop a large and well funded safety department.
2. Increase standards and regulatory compliance by bringing operators together under a single approval, headed up by a highly qualified team of industry leading professionals that an organisation operating alone could not access, using state of the art systems and procedures.
3. To draw on the Registered Training Organisation capability, the CRICOS approval to deliver training to overseas students, and the Part 142 capability (highest accreditation for a flying school), to pursue opportunities with large international contracts and to develop export markets.
4. To protect the Australian owned sector of the industry, as more than half of all pilot training in Australia is now delivered by foreign owned Companies with the majority of those being Chinese owned.
5. Getting instructors into the aircraft and focussed on teaching the student with improved quality outcomes.
6. 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,
7. Spreading the administrative expense of compliance across more than one organisation, significantly reducing the expense to each Alliance member.
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