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Jeez AOTW i hope you dont think CAsA is full of "experts"
No, but it's not exclusively full of no-hopers either, as people are suggesting here. Of course there will be good and bad people in that organisation, as there are anywhere.
My point is that if you replace CASA with something else, that something is going to end up pretty much the same as we have now because of the kind of society we live in.
We all think we could do better, but you're never going to get rid of the requirement to have enforceable rules vetted to within an inch of their lives by lawyers.
The line that CASA is running a conspiracy to kill aviation in Australia is just an excuse to have a whinge. I don't have any affiliation to CASA and I don't particularly like the way they write their regulations, but in the main I think they're just trying to do their job within the unavoidable constraints of the law.
Well said. There is no way this or any other Australian government is going to get rid of CASA or the ATSB without replacing them with something similar. They have to have a regulator by international treaty and a failure to comply would mean QANTAS, Virgin et al would be denied access to other countries airspace.
The bit about enforceable rules
vetted to within an inch of their lives by lawyers I must take exception to. What we are currently seeing is a dogs breakfast of legislation which I suspect is partly due to CASA's desire to put itself as the arbiter of what it all means. That will not wash with the courts who have a distinct distaste for a lack of clarity in legislation.
A sometime poster to these pages wrote a submission to the Senate inquiry into CASA that I think was accurate. In essence, the regulator, which was formed out of the RAAF following WW2, has never understood general aviation. It is staffed at the senior levels mostly be ex-airline or RAAF people who just don't get what needs to be done to make aviation work at all levels. Hence the legislative push to follow the European model which has the same lack of understanding.
In the past the regulator was given a very muddled role in that it was to be both the regulator and promoter of aviation. It cocked that up and finally the government of the day grew some testicular fortitude to actually make a decision and told CASA that it was to be a regulator only. What they should have done as well was set out some clear policy guidelines for aviation but that has always been beyond government who don't understand the industry.
What should also be done is remove the prosecutorial power from CASA. The decision to prosecute should be solely one for the DPP after reviewing the evidence provided by CASA. At present CASA can use the AAT to remove a person's livelihood, something the AAT was never designed for. The features of the AAT make it totally unsuitable as a forum for actions to revoke a licence or AOC. You would never see a prosecution for a driving offence in the AAT, the same should apply to a flying offence.