Some including gobbledock at #192 are asking for a Royal Commission but there’s no need. Justice Staunton did a fine job with his Commission of Inquiry into the loss of Seaview’s Aero Commander on 25 July 1994. From watching 4 Corners, reading the ATSB Report and especially reading CASA’s audit report, clearly little has changed. There’s nothing to distinguish between Seaview in 1994 and Pel-Air in 2009. Both orgs callously disregarded regulation; suffered imbalance between commercial and safety imperatives; fiddled defect reporting; and fudged the distinctions between charter and RPT at Seaview and between charter and airwork at Pel-Air;
Some of Staunton’s pithy quotes seem reflective of both orgs and are worth repeating:
- “Evident throughout was an approach by the CAA to unsafe practices or breaches of the law by operators............To the extent that outside pressures (legal, political, industry and managerial) affected the ability or resolve of officers to take decisive and forceful action may be termed ‘institutional timidity’, then that expression is probably an accurate description...”
- There was a body of evidence before the Commission which suggested that the problems identified with Seaview Air were certainly not confined to that Company...”
- “Seaview Air.... remained a haphazard organization”. It was not receptive to criticism and wrote internally before the accident that “Seaview has operated in our current manner for 5 years now – why has it has suddenly become such an issue is beyond me – quite frankly I have stepped on larger cockroaches than some of the CAA cretins I have encountered over this”.
- “It is plain that before the crash on 2 October 1994 Seaview Air was not subjected to close scrutiny by CAA...........on a significant number of occasions Seaview Air was guilty of serious regulatory breaches. Its aircraft were often overloaded. Its pilots cheated on maintenance releases. Cargo was transported unrestrained......”
There’s one significant difference between Seaview and Pel-Air. Seaview’s deficiencies were detected before the accident by a diligent Airworthiness Inspector, but his complaints were overruled under CAA’s ambit that “You are a servant of the Industry whether you like it or not”. Whereas nobody at CASA even noticed Pel-Air’s shonky practices.