I refer to the Director of Aviation Safety’s letter dated 30 April 2015, inviting feedback on the new flight crew licensing suite of regulations.
As a preliminary point I note that the many stated aims of the new regulations have, over the years, included:
- “safety through simplicity”
- “harmonisation”
- “a less prescriptive, outcomes-based safety regime”, and
- “no exemptions” (because they would no longer be necessary in a simple, harmonised, outcomes-based safety regime).
The new regulations achieve none of those aims. In fact, they achieve the opposite.
The Dreamliner was promised but the Spruce Goose has been delivered. The people who paid and waited for the Dreamliner are now not only stuck with the Spruce Goose, but are expected to take seriously the suggestion that this monstrosity can be “continuously improved” into an even better Dreamliner, this side of hell freezing over.
I invite CASA to identify one provision of the new flight crew licensing regulations that has demonstrably caused an improvement in safety compared with the pre-existing regulations, at no cost or at a cost commensurate with the improvement.
I note that a person required to keep a personal logbook commits a criminal offence if the person does not retain the logbook, unaltered, for seven years after the last entry was made in the logbook: CASR 61.355. I invite CASA to describe one realistic scenario in which the throwing of a pilot’s logbook into the bin, 6 or so years after the pilot’s last flight as crew, would cause any material safety risk. Just one realistic scenario. (Hell, even an unrealistic scenario might shed some light on what’s going on in the head of whoever decided that making this a crime would contribute to safety.)
I note the exquisite genius of the confusion created by the convoluted complexity of the meaning of “flight time” in Part 61 of CASR compared with the definition of “flight time” in the 1988 Regulations. In the 1988 regulations, the duration of a flight starts when an aircraft first moves under its own power for the purpose of taking off. That definition in itself causes some chronically-unresolved issues. E.g. the PIC can’t give binding directions to PAX during ‘push-back’, because 309A is linked to the definition of ‘flight time’ in the 1988 regulations.
But now we also have Part 61, in which the duration of a flight starts from the moment an aircraft begins moving, whether or not under its own power, in preparation for flight. Does that mean I log PIC time from the moment I tow my aircraft out of the hangar in preparation for flight? If so, I’ve just increased my aeronautical experience by about 25%, by all the hangar door closing, head scratching, nervous weeing and paperwork I do before turning the key. Am I therefore 25% safer?
Of course, it’s not possible to understand what all of the new regulations mean, without knowing about and understanding the effect of the myriad of exemptions that may variously negate, alter or extend the effect of the regulations. Given that I realised, about 10 years ago, that almost nothing in the ever-growing piles of regulations and manuals and exemptions made much practical difference to the safe conduct of flying activities, I doubt whether I’ll ever be inclined to gain that understanding, or that my safety will be compromised by not doing so.
Importantly, I realise that many in CASA are among us poor passengers stuck on the Spruce Goose. Although lots of people blame CASA for the design of the Spruce Goose, I realise that CASA has neither the resources nor the competence to design a safety regulatory regime and, to the limited extent that CASA has come up with good design ideas, changes have often been dictated by people outside CASA - the government equivalent of the marketing gurus and the bean counters and the legal department, all of whom have irreconcilable demands and won’t be on the test flight.
But problems are difficult to solve unless there’s an understanding and genuine acknowledgement of the real extent of the problem.
The problem here is that the new regulations are a monstrosity, and no amount of continuous improvement is going to change that.
CASA needs to genuinely acknowledge and confront that problem, or it will continue to be part of and blamed for it.