Dick said:
Perhaps Creampuff would like to comment, and may like to volunteer his services free. In that case, I will certainly go ahead!
To take the last issue first: I doubt whether a wheelchair-bound, acne-stippled geek from Hicksville USA could match it with real lawyers.
On the substance of the issue, I’m afraid that if the incoming Minister/Government is not inclined to intervene, AA will, as a matter of practicality, get away with almost any reduction in service to GA it is inclined or talented enough to think of.
Much criticism is leveled against Dick for his advocacy of ‘affordable safety’. Both Dick and his critics are correct in my view, without quite understanding where their respective opinions diverge.
At the heart of the disagreement about ‘affordable safety’, which is indeed a fact of life, is:
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the price put on a life and
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the timing of the cost paid for the loss of a life.
That’s where the profound shift has occurred in the last couple of decades.
It used to be the case that society was prepared to spend substantial amounts of money, year after year, to reduce the risk of loss of life in all sorts of activities. Flight Service was one of those risk reduction institutions.
But how to measure the ‘value’ of the reduction in risk? Answer: impossible.
It’s:
1. not possible, first, to quantify the number of lives saved (how do you ‘prove’ that Pilot Bloggs’ aircraft wouldn’t have ‘crashed’, or that he and his injured pax would have been saved, if he’d just had the benefit of Flight Service info and timely ‘guidance’ when things got tense?) and
2. not possible, secondly, to ‘prove’ the expenditure was ‘worth’ the lives saved (how do you ‘value’ the life of, for example, an innocent child whose life is saved as a consequence of timely assistance from Flight Service?)
In the short term, the service is taken away and someone says: “Nothing’s changed, therefore the service wasn’t worth its cost.”
There’s no balance sheet line item for the potential value of lives saved today or in the future, and even if there were, governments (plural) aren’t inclined to fund the preservation of lives unless an election outcome might turn on the issue.
That’s a recipe for the ‘short-termism’ that pervades infrastructure planning in the quaint third world polity that is Australia.