Originally Posted by
Mach E Avelli
Someone please explain what this evolving pissing contest about relative accident statistics has to do with recognition of military instructors, and whether our CASA is unreasonable compared with FAA.
To debate suitability of instruction methods and instructor backgrounds in achieving safety, instead of trotting out obscure charts and numbers on GA rates, why not also compare relative accident rates between the USA military and Australian military? Crashes per thousand hours flown, please, so that we can understand the numbers.
No? Too hard?
OK one more time,
The reason I used relative accident rates was to establish if there was tangible difference between the standard of training between the US and Australia. Once you understand that the overall accident rate between the two countries is pretty much the same with the US being ahead of late then one can assume that there is no major flaw between the two when it comes to how pilots are trained and their relative competencies. If anything, Australia seems to have more issues with accident rate than the USA, particularly in regard to mid air collisions, which dealing with traffic is something that should be taught during all stages of gaining a licence/certificate, so therefore is a training failure if the rates are statistically higher. Considering the USA has much more complicated/difficult flying conditions then you should deduce that the accident rate should be higher than Australia by it's nature, but it's not.
So we come to the part where we join the dots wrt military pilots. Many civilian instructors in the US are ex-military who gained their certificate through conversion and do not require any form of direct supervision, they can teach whatever they can convert relative to their military ratings. So that means they could teach anything from ab-initio through to multi engine IFR, immediately, without supervision. The accident rate shows that there is no increased problem occurring from all these converted military instructors acting without supervision. After all the reason we have rules, certificates and ratings is to ensure pilots are safe and competent to do what they are doing.
So why is it, with that in mind, that Australia will not let a RAAF QFI convert to high level instructor authorizations and act unsupervised? There's no arrogance or elitism about it, it's a valid question when you compare what we do to the USA.