Readers may recall the thread I started around this time last year to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the loss, on 2 October 1994, of VH-SVQ and all nine souls on board. In that thread I stated among other things:
The report of the $20 million Commission of Inquiry into the Relations between the Civil Aviation Authority and Seaview Air followed 2 years and later. The Minister for Transport at the time the report was handed down noted in Parliament:
Honeymooners Leeca and Anthony Atkinson were setting out on the first day of their new life together. Reg and Pam Drayton were setting out on what was for them a second honeymoon; Stephen and Carol Lake and two of their five children, Judith and Benjamin, were setting off on a family holiday. The report paints a picture of the young pilot, Paul Sheil, as also being a victim of this unsafe organisation. These are the tragic consequences of wanton operators and an incompetent and timid regulator. They are not just statistics.
Commissioner Staunton's fifth recommendation was:
That in respect of Civil Aviation Regulation 206 (relating to various forms of commercial operations, including regular public transport operations) urgent consideration be given to amending or replacing the Regulation to overcome the problems identified in the course of the Commission.
That recommendation was made
eight years ago. Today, all of the problems identified by the Commissioner in Regulation 206 remain. The definition of the operation specifically mentioned at recommendation five - regular public transport - is in exactly the same terms.
According to sworn evidence by regulators, time and time again, in front of Senate Committees, the new classification of operations rules have always been 'in development' and 'just around the corner'. The current 'target date' is 4th quarter 2004.
It's now
nine years since that recommendation was made, and the 'target commencement date' for the new classification of operations rules has now been delayed – sorry, 're-established' – to 1st quarter 2008.
The CEO of CASA delivered a speech, entitled
The CASA Safety Program - New Initiatives in a Time of Change at the 2005 Safeskies Conference on 27 October 2005. A transcript is available from the CASA website. In that speech the CEO said, among other things, that:
Some New Initiatives
Having described some of the principles that have guided the approach to change at CASA, it may be appropriate to say something of the individual changes.
Regulation Development
The making of safety regulations is one of our significant functions. In terms of lessons learned the history of regulatory development in CASA has not been one bathed in glory. There have been a number of programs aimed at regulatory reform over the near decade that CASA has been in existence. And each failed to deliver, for a variety of reasons. That represents quite an expenditure of resources for limited output, and that is unacceptable.
The most recent attempt involved a ‘big bang’ approach aimed at getting the whole spread of regulations reviewed and re-launched as a package. This approach was understandable because many regulations are cross-linked, so to develop one suite without another related suite meant potential difficulty. But the result was a massive effort tying up substantial resources across CASA and severely limiting the availability of those resources to be directed to endeavours which arguably might have a more direct and immediate influence on safety. And regulations were being produced which were overly prescriptive, excessively complex and in many cases offered minimal contribution to safety. I wasn’t prepared to accept that.
So the lesson here was that unless luck is on your side, a ‘big bang’ risks a subsequent implosion. The initiatives arising from that have included restructuring the way we do things to place the people working on regulatory development into the operational areas that work directly with the relevant industry sectors. Rather than trying to solve all the regulatory issues at once, we will be using small focussed teams to tackle individual regulatory packages, without ignoring the inter-relationship issue. We will also be careful reviewing, in association with industry representatives, all new regulations to make sure that they are outcome based, are simple, and make a genuine contribution to safety.
Maintaining the regulatory development focus, in the past we had an aversion to looking overseas for guidance. The line usually run was that the Australian aviation environment is special, and it was not feasible to pick up the regulatory structure of another aviation nation and apply it here. And in fairness there were limited options for suitable models. However, the newly formed European Aviation Safety Agency is taking a fresh approach to regulatory development, embracing a number of the rule-making priorities mentioned earlier, so we have established a small industry / CASA team to work with EASA on a trial program to test whether one particular set of their new rules may have some application here. This is something of a change for us, and a further recognition of the need to learn from past lessons.
Well may the CEO say that the expenditure of resources on 'regulatory development' with limited output is "unacceptable", but he's already presided over nearly 2 years of it, with more to come, and the people involved will continue to get paid buckets of money whether they do nothing, do lots, achieve nothing or achieve lots, produce nothing or produce lots.
The lessons have been learnt before; the approach has been tried before.
Adjectives continue to elude me.