Crab, your questions are spot on.
From what I can recall most if not all of the accidents relate to private operations, even though they may be of more than a 2 or 3 machine operation. That is not to say that all commercial ops are blemish free.
Our FOI's are very very thin on the ground and their CASA resources so tight it is despicable. Further they are saddled with trying to come to terms with a new set of regulations which are mostly in limbo, that is we are going from old to new, the gate is shut behind us but there is no way with the new as yet do much of our C&T.
It is a space worth watching as our previous CASA CEO has been mooted to pick up the top job in ICAO, I do not envy all of you the potential outcomes over there when one looks at the mess left behind him here.
Like his predecessor he was well referenced speaking in aviation experience but came from a military background mostly where the nuances of making for user friendly rules in a corporate and thus practical sense are foreign to him. One could say. just a fly by might contractor looking for a few more kudos, not, a real professional aviator.
Mostly it is very difficult to audit these sorts of flights when you envisage one or two active FOI in the whole bush area which is from Geraldton WA right around to Rockhampton Qld and north of a straight line between those points, trying to do something about that and also the routine day ops where people endemically under record and just genuinely operate like cowboys, particularly WRT conducting illegal commercial ops..
It is a culture problem, a massive one. These blokes are taught the Air Leg well enough "to pass an exam" full well in the knowledge they won't be tested on it ever again, until -- that dark night.
Unless we can successfully migrate to the new CSAR Part 61 and other parts some of which are still being written and we have as mooted, more C&T types who operate as sub ATO / FOI type people we will never have the resources.
As in illustration under my AOC we do Ag day only, but there is only one Ag Rated C&T person under the new regs in the whole country to check out those pilots. We are still grappling with whether the pilots need to be checked out in all types the pilots do ag in or just for the ag rating to cover all types. I don't know whether that person is night ag rated which if not leaves that sector in limbo.
I don't think this one person is rated an all ag types used here. This conundrum has existed since September when the new Part 61 was enacted so there is only eight months for those pilots to become recurrently checked under the 12 months requirement.
We cannot write out mustering endorsements at the moment I believe and most of us will spend the entire wet season reading the new regs trying work our way through them and also supposedly rewriting our Ops Manuals every time a new CSAR part relative to our operations becomes enacted. This I have been told by my FOI might occur once a year for each of the next 4 or 5 years. A rewrite comes out at between 3 to $4,000,00 a hit not to mention the time it takes us.
It is a great impost on those of use who try to follow the rules and once again a great promotion for easy street for our far less cost hindered illegal opposition, which provides for more illegality etc., etc., etc..