On Mar 3, 2016, at 4:48 PM, Mike Borgelt <mborg...@borgeltinstruments.com> wrote: > Also I really liked your guest article in the last AOPA magazine. > Can you post it here?
Sure. I haven’t seen it in print, so I don’t know how they edited it, but here’s the original copy: "Things that irk me about CASA's online regulatory services survey." CASA has been asking aviation stakeholders to fill out a voluntary online survey which seeks to baseline their performance. The survey poses a series of statements or questions, and asks respondents to provide a rating on a scale ranging from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree." There is a question on the fourth or fifth screen which asks you to rate whether you agree or disagree with the statement, "Regulations play a key role in ensuring that I operate safely." CASA's belief that that statement needs to be true is one of their weirder affectations. If it were true, my safety standards would change when I flew in different jurisdictions with different regulations. But they don't: The USA doesn't have a "minimum height" rule like Australia does, but that doesn't mean that I'm going to plough into trees. Much of the world has no maximum altitude before O2 must be carried and used, but I'm not suddenly going to choose to be hypoxic if I fly in those places. My safety standards are a product of my training, my airmanship, and my personal minima, and where I pay attention to regulations at all it's almost always to have arguments with people on the internet, rather than to actually affect the safety of my flying. But CASA believes that their regulations are critical to safety. Moreover, they also believe that the regulatory reform that everyone has been distracted by for most of the last 20 years is all about better safety outcomes. So, is it? Unlike most Government departments, CASA's performance is objectively measurable. If their regulatory reform is actually enhancing safety, we should see ATSB accident and incident stats decrease. And, because our regulations are (according to CASA) more modern and better than our overseas brethren, our stats really ought to be better than everyone else's, or at least trending towards better faster than everyone else's. But they aren't. Our rate of accidents is more or less constant. Pilots make the same dumb decisions over and over, having the same accidents over and over, no matter how many regulations they need to ignore to get there. And completely compliant pilots (which is what virtually all of us like to believe we are!) are almost as likely to kill themselves as lawbreakers. Over the lifetime of CASA's regulatory reform program, our accident stats have barely changed. Which tells me that we wouldn't have been worse off if the regulatory reform program had never been started in the first place; and we're unlikely to be better off if it ever finishes. Even worse: Our accident stats aren't materially different from anywhere else in the world. We'd be just as well off if a significantly smaller and cheaper CASA had said, "We're not going to waste any time writing our own rules, we're just going to photocopy the regs from the New Zealanders. Or the Americans." (just don't choose the Europeans, they're even worse than CASA and still don't fly any safer than we do) They've spent hundreds of millions of dollars over decades, and have barely nudged the accident stats. If they're all about enhancing safety, they have objectively failed. As a private pilot, the thing I want to see from CASA is pretty simple: "Right, boys, pencils down. Sit back, put your hands on your heads. ON YOUR HEAD, Jenkins. We're waiting. Good. Now don't touch anything." Then, once they're no longer consumed and distracted by rewriting regulations which accident stats indisputably show didn't need rewriting in the first place, I want them to cast their eyes around the world to places where aviation thrives, and cherry-pick the best bits. I want a regulatory system which assumes we're going to look after our own safety (because we manifestly do -- and the people who don't aren't swayed by regulations anyway). Having made that assumption, the regs can then be all about enabling things and making them easier, instead of being about penalty clauses and strict liability. Buckleys and none, right? I fully expect to be making these same points, after watching the same arbitrary enforcement overreaches in the face of the same accident stats ten years from now, assuming GA still exists in something like its present form by then. We can't have a negotiation about CASA's future, we can only be negotiated at. Have a look at the latest ATSB statistical report, and read it with an attitude that says, "If CASA has objectively put their money where their safety-enhancing mouth is, there should be a long term fall in the accident or fatality rate per million departures or per million hours, and we could explain it by reference to regulatory improvement." Can you see ANY evidence of that? Figure 17 on page 59 speaks closest to my class of operation; what about yours? Are you on figure 21 on page 79? Has CASA's enforcement and regulatory reform made your sector of aviation safer? Or would you be in exactly the same boat under the regs as they existed ten years ago? http://www.atsb.gov.au/media/5474110/ar2014084_final.pdf If you would, why did they expend so much time, effort, money, and aggravation to change them? What is it all for? Who is actually better off? To be clear: I'm not suggesting that regulations shouldn't change. If they didn't, we wouldn't have light sport or ultralight aircraft, we'd all be using huff-duff instead of GNSS, and we'd still be saying Able Baker Charlie Dog instead of Alpha Bravo Charlie Delta just like everyone did in the good ol' days. I'm suggesting that CASA's notion that safety is caused by regulations is a fundamentally batty oversimplification, one that's only capable of arising in an organization whose only tool in the toolbox is regulation. "When your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail." So of course they think like that, regulation is literally the only lever they have to pull. But I don't think anyone else has such a naively childlike view of how safety happens, maintained with such palpable indifference to objectively measurable accident data. What I'm suggesting is that the mindset change CASA needs to be led through is one which breaks the explicit mental linkage between safety and regulations. Once they've achieved that, they can approach regulation as an enabler, rather than the horrible arbitrary punitive mess of bullshit that virtually every submission to the Forsyth Inquiry complained about, as if with one voice. If Skidmore is really serious about cultural change, this is where he'll start. _______________________________________________ Aus-soaring mailing list Aus-soaring@lists.base64.com.au http://lists.base64.com.au/listinfo/aus-soaring
