Issue 100: September 1994

Seems clear enough and indeed the attitude of what one would expect from a responsible Government. Well, as you and I unfortunately well know, the above amounted to nothing more than political hyperbole as by late 1990 the Government had decided to fully recover the cost of financing its safety responsibilities from the industry itself. Thus emerged the dreaded Safety Tax that we have dedicated thousands of words to previously reporting and like so many ill thought out decisions by Government in recent years only serves to jeopardise the financial viability of many smaller GA operations. What the Government has done in recent years is to create a fiscal climate within the CAA that required it to be trimmed not with the balance of a surgical knife but a woodsman’s axe in order to reduce its manpower and costs. It had to make a profit and always has, indeed a handsome profit by any measure given the recessionary times of late and yet the Government has deliberately pursued a course where the CAA has lost a massive amount of its established technical expertise and a wealth of practical grass roots knowledge.

Not all these people were ‘perfect’ and indeed many did need to be replaced, but in the process far too many went who shouldn’t have with their jobs in many cases disappearing forever. This is hardly news though to those within the industry and is emphasised by the fact that the all important safety standards area was deemed to be so badly performing that it was only last year reformed from the Safety Regulations and Standards Division to the then much heralded Directorate of Aviation Safety. Another name change and yet another staff reshuffle (with oddly less and less pilots each time involved in the decision making process) as the new unit takes off and presto, Minister Brereton now sets upon us the Aviation Safety Agency. The ASA is stated by the Minister to be the new look agency that will oversee everything that the DASR presently does. By Mr Brereton’s account it will have a particular emphasis on ensuring all operators, large and small, are following correct operational procedures both in the air and on the ground.

One very sound aspect of its brief is to link the fiscal wellbeing of an operator with the degree of safety auditing that it receives. Thus if an operator begins to have financial problems with the CAA then it will go under the surveillance microscope, something that would have stopped the Monarch crash being just that, if of course enough people had been employed in the first place to provide the level of surveillance the industry and travelling public deservedly expect. In short, the situations that led to the Monarch accident should never be allowed to occur again. To do this however, the ASA will have to have quite an increase in personnel over the existing DASR and to this the Minister’s press release statement of July 20 wistfully adds: “The Minister for Transport has recommended that the Government assume financial responsibility for the public interest regulation of aviation safety. This will eliminate any possibility of safety regulation being compromised by the 50% industry cost recovery of CAA functions under the present arrangements.”

In one throwaway paragraph the entire multiyear Safety Tax battle seemed over. To say that the aviation world was stunned is by any margin a massive understatement. However, at time of writing it appears that the Minister’s press release could have been better worded as stripped of the PR hype it seems that what the Minister meant to say was that they ‘might’ do that, and again they ‘might’ not. All will apparently be revealed in the fullness of time! Hopefully the Parliamentary Inquiry into the CAA being chaired by ex-Aviation Minister Peter Morris will reveal all. This inquiry will look into the financial aspects of the aviation industry, particularly in relation to third level commuter and GA operations and what ‘real world’ problems they face that need to be attended to. Peter Morris was one of the few ministers to hold the portfolio that appeared to be actually interested in the subject matter. So interested in fact that he even took flying lessons at his own expense and in his own time to get a better understanding of the subject. Hopefully his report will do much to highlight the problems that GA flies under though unfortunately we would not expect too many words sheeting home responsibility to its political masters for what has happened within the CAA of late. For its part, the CAA will also be issuing a specific response on the allegations made against it to the Minister by late August.

At the end of the day though it is the politicians, all of them, that should be bearing a major portion of the responsibility for what overtook Monarch Airlines flight OB301 that fateful night. It was after all the politicians who denuded the CAA of much of its crucial skills base at a time when deregulation meant that surveillance really needed to be increased, not decreased. There is a remedy however and that is to simply ensure that the new Aviation Safety Agency is financially remote from the income producing areas of the CAA and that, like BASI, it is fully Government funded and supported with the resources it requires to perform its task. Is this really so much to ask?