The Skull is a lapdog. ICAO say jump and he says 'how high'!
SMS, HF, FRMS all being implemented due to CAsA having too. Nothing off their own initiative.
The Colgan crash in the USA was the catalyst for FRMS. For those of us who work frontline and in the real world we knew fatigue has been an issue for a long long time. But the costs associated with managing fatigue, creating more 'people friendly' rosters which would mean less hours flown and a requirement for more Pilots and other safety critical roles has been contested by greedy grubby organisations for years. And ICAO knew that Fatigue Management would upset industry and their precious profits hence their sitting on their hands....until Colgan. Colgan was the excuse ICAO needed to introduce change, and so they finally did.
Ziggy , the NTSB report on Colgan is worth a read. The FAA had to also fall into line due to some of the causal factors. There are a few papers out there on Colgan from a HF and FRMS perspective and they are worth a read. Also prior to 2008 our own former quality investigator the ATSBeaker was poking around HF and Fatigue issues but that slowed off of course once the Beaker got his bureaucratic paws on the place, Beakerised it and commenced his mi mi mi mi-ing.
My concern is that the Voodoo witch doctor will do as he has done with SMS and Just Culture and take FRMS, dissect it, smother it in PhD tautology and his bureaucratic wankery and try to turn it in to something else, something on a higher plain (or plane) where only he and the Beaker reside in their intellectual wonderland!
I truly hope we don't have our own version of a Colgan down under, but I think Pel Air, Lockhart and Canley Vale all have elements of Colgan in them. Lets hope all factors don't combine together and we end up with a large smoking hole, or has Sunny would say 'a smoking hole or three'.
Ziggy keep up the good work, you are not a lone voice, you have support. And you can also be proud that you have a bigger set of dusters than our Regulatory wiener boys over sighting our industry.
We all hope your physical and mental scars subside with time
