It is not possible to guarantee that humans will always behave and CASA has no business requiring APTA to do the impossible.
True.
But I’ll guarantee that humans make mistakes and, occasionally, even deliberately break rules. I used the example of GA aircraft defects and GA aircraft maintenance releases for the reasons I explained.
It's not about 'guaranteeing' that each and every contravention will be detected.
The answer “we trust everybody” is not, in itself, enough for any kind of complex system involving humans. I’ve yet to see a fraud control policy in any big organisation that is one sentence: “We just trust everybody.” (One of the ways in which auditors detect fraud in organisations: Their books are perfect and nobody’s ever made a mistake with the organisation’s money.)
I think “trust but verify” is the cliché required approach, with practical actions available when contraventions are
inevitably detected.
The question: “What is APTA going to do when it finds out a 'base' instructor has not been recording defects?”, is a perfectly reasonable one and does not set the standard at impossible perfection. The question assumes a contravention has occurred. But there has to be some way of detecting some contraventions, then finding out whether they’re a mistake or deliberate or whatever, then doing something practicable about it.
We’ve been through the comparison with a ‘standard’ local flying school before and you, too, need to get your head around the key difference between a ‘standard’ flying school and the ATPA structure before it collapsed. The AOC holder at the ‘standard’ local flying school has direct legal control over most of the wandering cats that can cause problems. An officer of the AOC holder, or the AOC holder him or herself, are usually physically there during much of the activity. (How many instructors do you reckon instruct at a ‘standard’ local flying school without having
any relationship as employee of or contractor to the AOC holder (unless, of course, that instructor is him or herself the AOC holder)? That AOC holder has legal and effective options at his, her or its disposal to detect and deal with detected contraventions in the course of flying training under that AOC.
You listed those options earlier in this thread!
But APTA didn’t have those options because APTA didn’t have enforceable agreements between it and most of the wandering cats at the ‘alliance’ ‘member’ ‘bases’. And I’m not talking about an agreement with a single individual or a corporate entity at the ‘base’. There were other cats wandering around at those bases, with no binding legal relationship with ATPA. I’ve said it before: It’s a tragedy that this gap was not picked up and filled early in the development of the APTA structure and CASA should have picked it up during the consideration of the first application for a variation to APTA’s AOC to cover an additional ‘alliance’ ‘member’ ‘base’.
And I’ve also said before: The certification system for flying training in Australia is regulatory overreach. But I can’t change that. While the system is what it is, I’m trying to help Glen understand the arguments he’s up against, because I’ll bet my bottom dollar that CASA will have made and will continue to make this kind of argument (among others). It is what was in and between the lines of CASA's March 19 email, so I'm not revealing anything surprising.