Sunfish,
Thank you and I do know about the double bind, having had to compete,
and succesfully, over the years gainst operators who continue to operate as such and under the benign supervision of our CASA friends, and I agree with every single syllable and letter of your post.
Just some context around my remarks for you.
I have fairly recently completed a task which involved the building from a blank piece of paper a transport category only AOC with unrestricted worldwide operation and with the highest international SMS, best practise and management accreditations available. It is not BARS which does not even get close. However! Fleet now Citation, Phenom, Challenger and Gulfstream.
100 days between application and grant. This could not have been possible without the proactive support of CASA and a team around me with a great deal of experience and all of four us in "good standing", the COM written from scratch alongside the CASA guide and an internationally accepted template that would ubsequently be used for application to the aforementioned. I hold an further iteration of that in which CASA are particularly interested.
Fairly senior pilot applicant for a job and with the view that he didnt expect us to have one for "at least 18 months, but I can probably help you there", mistakenly asked with a straight face yet "whose Ops Manual did you steal/plagiarise to achieve that then". Your case rests.
Frank Arouet
Your namesake as a well known and oft quoted author had some very insightful comments in that direction and I have experienced it first hand. Usually with Leadsled and T28 as principal actors.
Creampuff,
Indeed, your legal interpretation of the HF content may well be correct, we shall see, and, we should also be agitating for the recovery of the recorders.
As you aver they may or may not shed any further light, but, shouldn't we, if only for the cause of natural justice, make them available. Or does the age old legal principle of letting sleeping dogs lie or in political terms "don't ask a question to which you do not know the answer."
Sarcs
I am sure we must have been watching the same broadcast but I came away even more confident than less with the ATSB and Dolans calm but fearless handling of the whole thing.
Are you suggesting that we reduce the level of inquiry to the "are you still beating your wife" category.
IMHO they got it right, the first AND last time.
They were IMHO prescient in recognising the hornets nest it would inevitably stir up, and the consequences that would follow, they had been there before.
They were going to be on a hiding to nothing as the messenger.
They were not the cause of the accident merely the reporters.
The fairly lengthy exchange surrounding the ATSB changing of an important safety factor from Critical to Less on the same evidence revealed to me the tight rope performance required by the ATSB in maintaining a difficult balance of fairness.
This is the time for more not less calm and reasoned dialogue.