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Reece
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Crunch Time At The Caa
It has been a long time in coming but the July 20 release of the Bureau of Air Safety Investigation reports into two significant air crashes has certainly spelt crunch time for the beleaguered Civil Aviation Authority. The BASI reports had all the hallmarks of a brewing thunderstorm. Weeks before it was generally known that the report on the Monarch Airlines accident in particular would reveal significant problems within the surveillance area of the Authority that had to be addressed. The loss of the MiG was another matter but also highlighted how it was essentially through a lack of resources that the CAA was unable to give these ‘unusual’ aircraft the attention they deserved. Full coverage of the BASI report and its ramifications appears elsewhere in this edition so we do not wish to repeat it all here on our editorial page but suffice to say that this situation has been building up since the CAA began its era of mass retrenchments in late 1991.
However, the source of the problem lies largely with the CAA’s political masters rather than the people entrusted with running the Authority itself. In breaking up the old Dept of Aviation into two separate operations in the late eighties – one handling airports (the FAC) and the other (the CAA) the airways and safety regulation environment – the Government was well intentioned though conveniently forgot that there still existed a responsibility on its part to fund the crucial safety regulation functions within CAA. In launching the CAA in 1988 the Minister responsible stated at the time: “At the outset the Government recognises that certain functions to be undertaken by the CAA should not be charged to the aviation industry but should be paid for by Government. Accordingly the Government has agreed to pay the CAA for the following: the development of safety standards; the shortfall in cost recovery of the implementation of safety standards; the monitoring of compliance with safety standards and the maintenance of the capability to undertake search and rescue.”
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