Just a little loose with the facts, as always.
The RASS services carried mail and rural residents and were always air charter operations …
Indeed, and the regulator agreed. That’s not what the prompted the regulator’s action in 1999. What prompted the regulator’s action in 1999 was the advertisements that invited any member of the public to pay to get on board – you know, people other than the rural residents, and their cargo, for whom the service was being subsidised.
And ‘the industry’ always overlooks the inconvenient and tawdry truth about who usually prods the regulator to take action. (To resort to a Leaddieism: Hint, it usually isn’t the regulator.)
None of this is to justify some of the distinctions drawn in the classification of operations rules that have no safety justification and, demonstrably, produce no comparative safety benefit. Nor is any of this is to justify the abject failure of successive governments to deliver any classification of operations reform.
It’s just to say that if you could get your facts straight and argue with and hold to account the people actually responsible for classification of operations reform, you might have a slight chance of changing things for the better.