Originally Posted by
LeadSled
Folks,
What has died, thanks to CASA and the ASIC card, is "fly yourself" tours by foreign pilots and their families, particularly those with a flying tour guide and a gaggle of aircraft.
It is not so much the expense of the bureaucratic bull****, but the almost totally impenetrable nature of the "process", and the degree to which CASA has made it an almost impossible obstacle course, both in time and process, to validate a foreign pilot license. With six/nine months or more pre-arrival in Australia preparations, it can still take three/four weeks before you can actually go fly.
It is just so much easier for a Yank, Canadian or any brand of European to say: "Sod Australia, I'll go for a fly around South Africa/NZ/almost anywhere else outside a war zone".
Tootle pip!!
PS: Mind you, "the industry" is not entirely without fault, the attempted rip-offs with so called "CASA mandatory" validation flight tests taking up to 10 hours including a 5 hour cross country, around AUD$4000.00, leave a very bad taste. and bad news travels with the speed of light (or the speed of twitter).
Yup this is true, flying holidaymakers were about 40% of my turnover until CLARC was created and it stopped dead overnight (as predicted) what used to take the regional office 24 hours can take anything up to 9 months. No staff seem to be trained to process this or stay long enough to be a trusted person to deal with.
I hoped with Part 61 that the brain dead people at CLARC would be taken out of the equation and this put into the hands of the flying schools, as other countries do. Unfortunately not. ASICS are a little easier than they used to be but until CLARC is abolished and people with some kind of brain function are put in charge of this it is pointless even advertising Australia as an ideal holiday destination for pilots, which is a great pity for GA and the areas these people would go to spend their cash.
To give people an idea, I had an American gent coming over for a flying holiday. He was very well organised and we started the process several months in advance and were assured that it would be processed by the time he arrived. The day before he got here, I checked up to see where it was as it hadn't arrived and was told that the person dealing with it had gone on sick leave therefore it was not going to be processed until he got back, probably not for at least two weeks. This gent had spent hundreds of dollars already.
I got the problem solved with a call to another CASA department altogether, who were able to make happen in a few hours what had taken CLARC four months with no result, but it was too late. Stuff like that now spreads like wildfire on social media.