There was a major lack of supervision by the CP and not even an experienced, more mature, real senior pilot. One has to say that the firm would not have employed a real senior pilot because it would have cost real money, money that they were apparently not prepared to pay. What is that expression 'You pay peanuts, you get monkeys'?
What is a real senior pilot? Or a chief pilot for that matter? The pilot in question was 26 years old and had the better part of 1000 hours. To become a chief pilot you only require (from memory) 500 hours and 3 months industry experience. Its pretty obvious that this person had more than that. Yet there are several companies (at least one in the top end that I know of) that have chief pilots that are younger with similar or fewer hours.
Is this wrong? How old should you be? How many hours? Are you realistically going to find ANY pilot that could be considered "senior" that would WANT to go live in Lake Evella flying locals around in C210's and C206's? Not bloody likely.
From this point onward those owners and CPs are totally responsible for ensuring that the activities noted above have finished. Period.
Oh yeah? How exactly? The company in question has bases all around east Arhnem. All but one of them at the time were staffed by one pilot. How is the CP going to know * exactly * whats going on all of the time? It would be impossible for the CP / Owner to make suprise checks on their pilots out there due to the fact that its such a tight community. Everyone knows everyone and you would just have to be listening to a base radio or aircraft radio to hear a familiar voice over the airbands.
A hypothetical situation if you will, lets say a report comes onto the chief pilots desk from another employee or other company pilot that they suspect that Joe Bloggs at Kickatinalong is doing some low flying or the occasional beat up. Chief pilot takes the pilot in, gives him a verbal thrashing and him them on the spot. With no evidence (and lets face it, most pilots wouldn't be willing to give evidence against a collegue) I wonder how quickly the company ends up in court for unfair dismissal.
I totally agree that there need to be systems in place to minimise the number of accidents that do occur. Better education, better training, closer supervision and more accountability will all help, but you will never prevent situations like these from happening again.
There is alot that this report has said, and yes, it is time for something to be done about it. It will take time and effort on the behalf of the regulator, the operator, the insurer and the pilot.