If you could only ask one question of the new DAS right now, what would it be?
A very simple question that will sort out, very quickly, whether Mr Skidmore has the necessary mix of integrity and understanding of the mess he's inherited.
Mr Skidmore: When will the regulatory reform program be completed?
I can tell you two out of many wrong answers and the one correct answer.
The first wrong answer I will quote is that of Mr Byron, from February 2005:
We have an action item to develop a plan to forward to the minister about when we plan to have them to the minister, and I assume that plan would be done in the next couple of months. I would be hopeful that it would not be long after early 2006 that most of the draft rules are delivered to the minister.
Only 3 months until that weasel-worded nonsense is 10 years old.
The second wrong answer I will quote is that of Mr McCormick, from that glossy work of fiction called the "Aviation Safety Yearbook 2013":
[O]ur current schedule will see the remaing rules completed by the end of next year.
Only 28 drafting days until Christmas! And what did the Forsyth Report say about how much longer it would really take to complete the regulatory equivalent of the Spruce Goose?
The correct answer is:
The fudamental flaw in the regulatory reform program is that the regulator is running it. The government should make, and take responsibility for making, the rules, and the regulator should be responsible for, and only for, administering them.
I have therefore handed over all open Projects to the Department, but with a recommendation that the current package of rules be repealed in its entirety, following the development of a new package with a fixed deadline of 1 January 2016.
A number of CASA staff have been made redundant, but the long term savings from this approach will be in order of hundreds of millions. And that's just in direct cost savings to CASA.
The benefit to the aviation industry of implementing a set of rules that works, and ending decades of confusion and empty rhetoric, will be incalculable.
(And Frank: Could you get a dictionary and look up some of those big words you use? I'm not sure they mean what I anticipate you hope they mean.)