What is the big issue with mandating radio? It can only be because you want to operate no-radio! Yes or No?
Bloggsie,
NO, spelt with a big N and a big O.
If you had half a clue about modern approaches to safety management (ie anything in about the last 20 years) or perhaps, read and understood any of the works of Hudson, Kern,Reason, Lees, Hall and so on, or any of the masses of data, research, field studies, and years of statistics, QAR analysis, operational (IOSA) audits etc., on what works and what doesn't, you might come to understand why "mandating" and prescriptive rules do not produce a "better" result, let alone the best result. Or put another way, the value of performance (outcome) based rules, instead of prescriptive rules with criminal penalties.
We know aviation is lagging much of Australian industry by many years in the field of safety management, but try and make some attempt to catch up with the knowledge of what works best, so far (and it ain't prescriptive regulation) in a field like flight operations.
We do want the best results, don't we ---- in this case minimizing the risk of a collision. I certainly do, I might be one of the passengers.
If you had some current background, you might begin to understand that "mandating" produces no detectable "better" results, and a range of negatives. One of which is complacency that "all you can hear is all that's there", not much use when all you have done is turn the lights on. Or you'r still on center, but out of range of the selected frequency, because you missed the change of center frequency you read back, as well as never broadcasting on the CTAF for your destination.
Don't read too much into 96-98%, apart from observational error, the AA figures showed the opposite, greater compliance in a CTAF than an MBZ, but a very high level of compliance in both cases. This goes double (not precisely double, just an expression) in an environment where "rules" cannot be enforced, anyway.
As you don't seem to be able to comprehend, the cases of non-compliance (with the mentioned exception) were mostly finger trouble, nothing to do with intentional non-compliance.
Wouldn't be a wonderful world if all we had to do achieve a perfect airsafety record was to "mandate" that pilots never make an inadvertent mistake, and where there are survivors from such a mistake, prosecute them as a criminal.
Just to reinforce the "value" of such a rule, perhaps we could make it absolute liability, not just a strict liability criminal offense, to reinforce in the mind of the flying potential criminal the draconian penalties for selecting the wrong mike switch, or selecting the wrong frequency, or any other of the variety of inadvertent non-compliances that come under the generic term:"finger trouble".
By the way, has it occurred to you that field survey teams might devise cunning ways to detect "non radio" traffic, perhaps those amazing observational devices called eyes, artificially aided by extraordinary devices called binoculars. And a little ripper called a digital camera with a thingie called a telephoto lens for easy identification of aircraft.
Amazing, some of the gadgets "they" have these days.They even have this beaut little voice recorder, so they don't even have to worry about a writing stick. Will modern miracles never cease.
Tootle pip!!