Mr Lovett your reply shows you fail to understand points 1-10. I will accept the minor historical correction as to the very early genesis of CAA/CASA. The responsibility lies fairly and squarly with governments of all persuasions and their failure to understand the industry and governance generally. The only and I stress only remedy to correcting any of this is to actually have a policy from the elected representatives of our nation that puts into place a new Act with a definition of safety. The current situation is but the end game of a series of failures to do this.
No matter what people think is a quick fix the reality is that the regulatory regime retains within its core the notion and concept that it is regulating safety but in fact safety means regulating the industry and its economics (In other words it is the two airline policy in another guise). The regulator imposes regulations that ostensibly come and refer back to this central core. So everything that CASA does is an impediment and serious cost to the industry with no appreciable outcome or change to safety. Everyone in the industry world wide knows what the safety issues are and how to address them. We know what proper maintenance should be, what proper training should be and we know what are appropriate rules and safety standards, they have been known and established for nearly five decades. We know what causes accidents and we know that the basic errors that lead to accidents have not changed in several decades. More importantly we know and have available to us this collective wisdom in the form of the regulatory structures and systems developed and agreed upon by ICAO and ultimately all formed about the FAA system.
CASA should have no controlling role in private or recreational aviation and has attempted to treat everybody in this sector as if they were Qantas or whoever, they are not. The owners of the aircraft bear the risk and they know that the manufacturer set the standards for maintenance and design and that is the appropriate standard not a cobbled together variation dreamed up by somebody with nothing better to do and an organisation that cannot relinquish this control and leave the industry to manage both its own operations and the risk. Behind this stands the ultimate risk managers the insurance industry and they will not cover unacceptable risk, pure and simple.
CASA should have no need to impose or require AOC's on aerial agriculture or aerial mustering and require them to operate within a regime that is suited to a large scale heavy aircraft passenger transport operation. Similarly with aerial work as we call it. Now if you look at what I have just said you will see that this constitutes nearly three quarters or more of CASA's business and is simply regulation for regulations sake. All that is required is a simple rule that states you as a private owner or aerial agriculture operator or aerial mustering operation maintain the aircraft in accordance with the manufacturers recommendations nothing more nothing less. In other words you as the owner are simply responsible for airworthiness. Every normal person has a vested interest every day in every day activity in not destroying expensive capital or losing lives.
So these are but a few examples to illustrate how Government and CASA has lost sight of what safety is and how to manage it properly. Without an Act that simply makes this clear, is stripped of hidden economic regulatory rules and is supported by clear and simple plain english regulations that adopt international best practice you will reform nothing.
The greater tragedy in the past years is that despite numerous Commissions of Inquiry, numerous Senate Inquiries, numerous other ad-hoc inquiries, this message has not stuck, has not been implemented and thus the accident that is CASA and the Australian Aviation Industry will continue. It is Government that is to be held to account and it is the politicians of this country that should be held to account for this very serious and quite depressing situation but they are it seems for reasons of their make up and inner workings incapable of enacting or implementing change and quite simply impervious to reason and incapable of listening to the anybody.