Because if they didn't, you'd have to have some other organisation with aviation expertise that did!
Again, the fundamental structural problem is that even the industry assumes that the organisation that makes the rules must be run by people with aviation expertise.
The primary reason Australia has an out of control aviation regulatory reform Frankenstein is that people with aviation expertise have been left by governments to create it.
People with aviation expertise are not qualified to make the decision as to where regulatory standards should be set.
I will demonstrate:
Tell me where the standards for ‘community service flights’, like Angel Flights, should be set.
Tell me how a bunch of pilots and engineers in CASA have the knowledge and expertise to decide where the risks of carrying someone on an Angel Flight are outweighed by the risks of leaving someone untreated or on the highway?
PPRuNe’s crawling with aviation experts: Tell me, precisely, where the minimum licence standards, the minimum aircraft airworthiness certification and maintenance standards, and minimum aerodrome standards should be set for ‘community service flights’, and why.
If you go through the exercise with a modicum of intellectual honesty and rigor, you’ll eventually come to this conclusion: People with “aviation expertise” can’t decide where to set the standards, because that decision is a political one, not a technical one. People with technical expertise can provide input to the decision, in the form of advice about comparative risks and objective data, but technical experts are not qualified to make the ultimate decision as to where the standards are set.
Get it?
This is why classification of operations is a decades-long running sore. This is why there are thousands of pages of regulations and MOSs that make little difference to practical safety. It’s the almost inevitable consequence of the meandering muddlings of an organisation running a process it isn’t competent to run, making decisions it isn’t qualified to make.
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.
So if a pilot suffers Alzheimer’s disease, the only way in which to cancel her medical certificate is to prosecute her for a crime?
