Eddie:
This maybe so, but old mate here where I am camped at the moment has been trying to get Jabiru to attend to the issues for over two years.
I agree that from what I have heard Jabiru has been, to put it mildly, less than stellar in its customer support.
However CASA has now used the equivalent of a shotgun to remove the proverbial splinter in the finger and it threatens the entire recreational aviation sector in the process.
The action against Jabiru is a perfect example, as if any more were needed, of the clearly deficient CASA culture. Even If we assume that CASA is genuinely interested in the safety of Jabiru operators, which I doubt, I would have thought that a rational strategy from a regulator who cared about the impact of its activities on its clients would be:
(1) Form a working group of CASA, RAA and Jabiru staff.
(2) Assemble available reliability data.
(3) Analyse the data to determine if there are systematic failure modes, compare the failure rates in each mode and in total against those for comparable engines, Rotax, Lycoming, Continental and others both certified and uncertified.
(4) As part of (3); Use statistical hypothesis testing to determine at a suitable degree of significance (say 95 and 99 percent) to quantify the risks of engine failure of Jabiru engines compared to the other makes.
(5) Now that we have rigourous data analysis, we can state the following: "We can say with 95% accuracy that the failure rate of Jabiru engines of this mod status is x/100,000 hours, compared to Rotax 912 engines with Y/100,000 hrs and lycoming with z/100,000 hrs".
(6) We can now look at options for improvement : " replacement of through bolts in X Jabiru engines will change failure rates from A/100,000 hrs to B/100,000 hrs at an estimated total cost of C dollars".
(7) We can then group the options to determine exactly what strategy results in the most bang per buck.
(8) CASA can then pull out its ******* great cannon and point it at Jabirus head and tell them to implement the recommendations as a set of service bulletins or CASA will issue them as airworthiness directives.
Yet what CASA seems to me to have done is adopt the opposite strategy; Ready, Fire, Aim.
And on a final, bizarre note, it would appear that the sensible strategy for an RAA Jabiru operator would be to replace the Jabiru engine with a completely untested car engine conversion. After all, if there is no data on its reliability, CASA have no grounds on which to restrict its use.