Seems to me that some significant rot had developed during the time Mr Bartsch was ostensibly responsible for "regulatory and safety oversight" of Rex. According to Slat's summary timeline:
1. There was a routine CASA audit of PelAir scheduled for October 2007. This had to be re-scheduled as the organisation could not provide sufficient paperwork to allow this 2007 audit to proceed.
2. The re-scheduled audit took place in March 2008. This audit was damning, finding multiple defects. Among the most serious was that the training records of 20 pilots were seriously deficient (for example, 80% of these records contained no evidence of training in emergency procedures). There were numerous other deficiencies - the full report is in the public domain. Most seriously of all, the company conceded its pilots had not been trained in fatigue management as required - this caused CASA to issue an immediate “Safety Alert” requiring the company to immediately cease operating under its existing fatigue management policy until this training was undertaken....
Were the identified deficiencies confined to the PelAir/Westwind aspects of the operation?
It seems very odd to me that, notwithstanding 6 months or so of advance warning, there were still such ostensibly serious deficiencies left to be discovered by the regulator during the audit. If accurate, it would suggest to me that the operator was out of its depth, or unperturbed by the prospect of the regulator finding serious deficiencies during an audit, or a mixture of both. If Slat's summary timeline is reasonably accurate, these regulatory interactions seem to me to have been almost entirely ineffective:
5. Following the crash, CASA conducted a special audit in November - December 2009. This was much more in depth than the routine March 2008 audit. What had been wrong in March 2008 was still wrong. Furthermore, additional serious problems came to light.
It seems to me to be little more than a pantomime - both sides going through the motions of finding and addressing the same deficiencies, over and over again.