These audits are political exercises in good manners really - nothin' 'll come of it.
They'll come in with their white gloves on, stick out a finger and wipe the coffee table and sniff... and disappear.
It's gonna turn in to an exercise in good publicity for Management and will help with creatin' the illusion that the airline is well managed. It also squares off the FAA against the Oz NTSB... one of whom may be somewhat critical of current practices whilst the other will soon attest to the usual shallow bona-fides and nothin' will change.
Look at how well they responded to the LOSA audit. Two new pieces of paper: outline the minor changes to the pre-departure process and your choice of coffee/tea? And that change isn't even working properly since engineering and fueling are still cluster-$#%&ed over it. And they haven't even
started to look at outstations... There has been no supervision/follow up/ enforcement of even this tiny tiny change... Just VP-Flt Ops writin' a memo (more than two years ago!) saying he knows how bad it is and he isn't sure what we're goin' to do yet. He implores us to keep on tryin' to do the right thing and minimize interruptions on the flight deck...
This is like a General tellin' his army:
I know we're losing, can you ask the enemy to stop shootin' at you? 
There are calm assurances on paper thet there are "teams" devoted to lookin' at a couple of "important" areas... but
nothin' of substance is happening.
We as pilots are still bein' fed the line that we are the last line of defence in Dr. Reason's Swiss Cheese model. The lovely sleight of hand that resulted in this model bein' pirated by magagement to be used to remind Pilots of how crititcal they are to the safe operation is beyond belief. It's a kind of creepy psychological operation in motivation... with no real change of practice behind it.
Every other layer of cheese - from the top of the operation to the Chief pilot on type has done sweet tweet to effect change or improvement. (The exception to this seems to be MM and his take no prisoners attitude towards the training department. This is, imho a welcome changes) Nothin' has improved or changed. 40,000 incident reports this year (Yippee!
) What has improved? Do we still have an insane amount of night ops scheduled back to back? Minimum days off? A stupidly conceived/designed/engineered/implimented CRC in the A345/A380? No double seat/curtained privacy in the A343? A 20% pay cut for '09 an' we're supposed to be happy professionals? Statements in the worldwide press from HH and MF identifying a probable 1 BILLION USD PROFIT for the fiscal year and we're still being screwed over by the unfair productivity changes, loss of contractually obliged Leave, some pilots had their ALD removed or altered, the messing with the accomodation allowance, accomodations standards...Tampering with the bid system... totally unresponsive fleet management to any form of input (JM and PP: 'out of office auto-reply'... have a nice day!)
There's about 2300 of us - clamoring to be heard, passing up lots of observations, lots of good intentions and an enormous amount of good will and experience being brought to bear on myriad challenges and nothing is changing.
Most of the ASRs we submit are mandatory submissions as directed by the FOM. Some are voluntary. (I'm not sure what the percentage breakdown is - I'd love to know). This creates the illusion that there's a culture of reportin' within our flight deck operation. That's not the same thing as having a true real culture of reporting -it's a
manufactured one.
Flight Ops management have subordinated the Flight Safety department to becoming the data gathering watch-dog. Flight Safety gather the QAR/ELOM data (in itself a useful thing of course) but the line separating a true 'blame-free' reporting culture has been erased: We basically only report on what we know the ELOM/QAR data has already busted us for. Flight Ops management use their stick to hit is for our transgressions (even though modern error models are overlooked) and everything else is ignored.
Indian and African ATC... Still a nightmare - I'm in my 14th year in this place -who the hell approved RVSM in Africa when they don't even have proper ATC? NO RADAR coverage in RVSM areas and some aircraft operations not required to have Transponders? JEEEZUZ H MURPHY! How the hell does this stuff get allowed to happen? Where the hell is the thinking goin' on around here?
Is there any at all?
Or is there just the insane demand for a more profitable operation?
Keep 'er safe Ladies 'n Gents. I hope 2010 won't be the year of our first hull loss, but the signs and portents are not in our favour. It's a nightmare out there.