Quote:
Originally Posted by
Asturias56 View Post
"You don't have to prove that you have $20m in liability when driving on a public road,"
There's a difference .................
Should there be?
In all Australian jurisdictions, car drivers have cover for third party death and personal injury under the compulsory third party insurance required to get the car registered. The amount the third party can recover is limited by the statutory scheme and generally the third party needs to establish fault on the part of the driver. There is no compulsory insurance for liability of drivers
for third party property damage (or associated economic loss) and no statutory limit on liability either - which is why you would be crazy to drive around without at least that additional cover (which usually has a limit of $10 million
AFAIK, which is designed to provide a comfortable buffer above the most extreme example of potential loss).
In aviation, commercial operators get some protection from unlimited liability for third party claims under statutes which implement international conventions (and their employees are indemnified by their employers by law). Commercial operators are then insured to a level which reflects those limitations.
Private operators/pilots do
not get that limit on liability. They should be insured to a level which reflects the level of risk if they don't want to expose themselves and their assets to third party claims. Pilots hiring aircraft should not assume that the owner/operator has insurance or, if they do, it extends to them as hirer. Even if covered, hirers may be liable for the excess/deductible (which might be quite high).
It is
absolutely standard and prudent for an organisation which owns or operates a facility to require someone who wants to the use that facility to have a prudent level of insurance for third party liability. It is likely to be a requirement of their own public liability insurer.
A new compulsory third party insurance scheme for aircraft could in theory be implemented to deal with all of this. I suspect it would be hard to get to work from an underwriting perspective because of the diversity of who needs to be covered but the (relatively) small overall number of policies to be issued (compared to motor vehicles - and everyone knows how hard motor vehicle CTP has been and continues to be to get right, and it only covers death and injury).
Sadly, this all costs money. Like everything.
TDB