‘’How is it that I can take 5 year old Timmy from Kerang to melbourne in order to see a Harry Potter play. However neither myself or my aircraft can do the identical flight if the destination is the children’s hospital:
There is a vast difference to offering to take a person flying in your own plane for whatever private reason and an organisation placing that person in your plane to fly for a specific purpose. A lot of things about how informed the passenger is about the safety and reliability of the service and training and competency levels of the pilot can be omitted. I've noticed that there is very little information detailing to passengers that the flights are weather dependent and possibly more restrictive than commercial RPT flights, also very little information on how varied the experience of each pilot is. I know this might put some passengers off the service but relieves pressure on the pilot when they have to explain they cant go that day due to weather and such. Also their prepare for flight information has uniformed pilots who look professional, this is misleading. Again as I said previously they need to be upfront and preemptive with safety standards of operation, CASA has already added complexity via laws, any more incidents and the service will get grounded or moved to requiring an AOC or something very restrictive.
I think they provide a great service, but I feel some mistakes are being made in regard to what they think is right in regard to responsibilities. Each incident or accident just puts more pressure on CASA to actually regulate the sector, if they can be proactive in self managing the risks then CASA will ignore them.
I would personally be quite happy to donate my time and aircraft if I still owned one for this service and it was possible.