But isn’t that pretty much the point Prometheus has been trying to make all along? Nobody’s saying the regulators themselves are causing this — the issue is that they’re not acting/telling other regulators to act. And while this might not have started as an aviation-specific problem, the government’s clearly recognised the wider regulatory inaction and is now trying to fix it.He’s also been saying that off-loading costs and hiding OCC or company-specific training inside the “type rating” is a way of evading the letter of the law. On paper it might look compliant, but only if you don’t look too closely. Let’s not pretend companies and lawyers always act lawfully — the Post Office scandal and Dieselgate both looked “legitimate” until people dug into the detail. These things are often hiding in plain sight until someone joins the dots.
Does anyone actually believe that pilots operating for certain carriers really “work for” some third-party agency? Or do they, in reality, work for the operator that trains them, rosters them, supervises them, disciplines them, and literally has to legally onboard them as crew? In both aviation and employment law, crew and employee are practically indistinguishable. That’s the whole point of the Lutz case — it exposed “agency” and “contractor” setups as disguised employment. The reality is that for any large airline, you simply shouldn’t be able to have anyone other than a direct employee in the cockpit if you expect to meet the joint requirements of aviation and employment law. Anything else isn’t innovation — it’s evasion dressed up as flexibility.
Just because an airline creates a shell company, issues a sham contract, and charges an inflated “training fee” that obviously includes company SOPs and OCC time doesn’t suddenly make it clean. it actually means there’s a failure of regulation. What he’s getting at, I think, is that power and scale allow them to normalise practices that would be called fraud anywhere else. They can literally shape the market around their own rule-bending. Paying for the type with a certain low-cost carrier is, in effect, all those dodgy things rolled into one — it’s still pay-to-fly, just dressed up way better incredibly clever tbf but still immoral and likely a systemic threat to flight safety if pilots are so in debt they can’t call sick.
We’re taught a lot about power dynamics in the cockpit, but the same thing happens at the organisational level too — when a company gets big enough, it can consolidate power over its own regulators. Look at Boeing and the MAX crashes. That’s what happens when oversight becomes dependent on the very people it’s meant to police.
I think everyone here probably agrees that the regulators have many issues and they’re clearly not necessarily doing everything they can or should be doing… which is probably why these conversations need to be had here and in the wider community.