Owners and Chief Pilots have had some onerous responsibilities for a long time. Those responsibilities include:
Civil Aviation Act section 28BE - Duty to exercise care and diligence
(1) The holder of an AOC must at all times take all reasonable steps to ensure that every activity covered by the AOC, and everything done in connection with such an activity, is done with a reasonable degree of care and diligence.
(2) If the holder is a body having legal personality, each of its directors must also take the steps specified in subsection (1).
(3) It is evidence of a failure by a body and its directors to comply with this section if an act covered by this section is done without a reasonable degree of care and diligence mainly because of:
(a) inadequate corporate management, control or supervision of the conduct of any of the body's directors, servants or agents; or
(b) failure to provide adequate systems for communicating relevant information to relevant people in the body.
CAO 82.0 Appendix 1 - 2 RESPONSIBILITIES OF CHIEF PILOT
2.1 The Chief Pilot for an operator is to have control of all flight crew training and operational matters affecting the safety of the flying operations of the operator.
2.2 The responsibilities of a Chief Pilot must, unless CASA otherwise specifies in writing, include the following responsibilities:
(a) ensuring that the operator’s air operations are conducted in compliance with the Act, the Civil Aviation Regulations 1988, the Civil Aviation Regulations 1998 and the Civil Aviation Orders;
…
(f) monitoring operational standards, maintaining training records and supervising the training and checking of flight crew of the operator;
…
They appear to have been neither complied with nor enforced in this case.
having had the opportunity of seeing Mr Hunt Snr and Jnr give evidence I am inclined to accept that they did not know what their pilots were doing.
One of more flagrant breaches of section 28BE that I’ve seen for a while.
SPLATR – sadly true. That was the point of my post. “Senior Base Pilots” busting the rules and dying in commercial operations, against a backdrop of no supervision or regulation, is apparently now such a mundane event in Australian aviation that the investigator doesn’t bother turning up.