Time for a clean sheet at CASA?

For those of us who deal with CASA on a regular basis, it seems to be in the throes of implosion. The skills shortage has affected it badly, leaving the core of good people overworked, frustrated, and increasingly unable to provide the services for which it exists in anything like a reasonable timeframe.

What is clearly overdue is a review of the relative priorities of the many tasks that the regulator currently does, in order to re-direct scarce resources to the higher priority areas. In the CASA field offices, it seems to be business as usual, with no sense of urgency, even for urgently required mandatory approvals, regardless of the resultant cost to the operator or the impact on the travelling public, and the good people continue to leave. It is also increasingly clear that the cuts to the operations staff in Canberra were far too severe, with industry being increasingly asked to take up the slack.

While industry wants to help, there is a finite limit to the amount of time that it can provide, and that limit has, for many, already been reached. Perhaps once the current ICAO Audit of CASA is finished, it might be appropriate for the Minister to consider a thorough “clean sheet of paper” review of the regulator’s role, tasks, organisation and management.

As is seen from the growing use of TIBA (traffic information broadcasts by aircraft) in Western Australia, Airservices Australia is also being hit hard by the skills shortage, but at least Airservices is keeping the industry in the picture, which is helping to ease the frustration of operators having to also cope with significantly increased traffic around non-towered airports.

A very positive recent move by Airservices has been the development of the National Operations Centre in Canberra, which will allow Airservices for the first time to monitor its operations in order to identify developing problems before they start to affect traffic, so that resources can be redeployed to minimise disruption, and airlines can be given advanced warning of impending issues.

Another strongly supported move is Airservices’s conduct of a UNICOM trial to try to determine whether UNICOMs can in fact enhance safety, and under what circumstances.

The highly respected Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) is reportedly also suffering to some extent from the skills shortage. Of more concern however is what the Miller Report will contain when it is finalised and released. Readers may recall that the Queensland State Coroner last year recommended that the Minister “consider engaging an external consultant to assess whether high level intervention is warranted”, adding that “I continue to detect a defensive and less than fulsome response” (by CASA) “to some of them” (ATSB’s recommendations).

In response to this recommendation, the Minister at the time, Mark Vaile, appointed a consultant, Russell Miller, a senior partner with Minter Ellison, to “review the relationship between the Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) and the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB)”. The Minister stated that he regarded “the safety of the fare paying passenger . . . of paramount importance. ” No-one would disagree with that.

However, the terms of reference for Miller’s review do not seem to quite accord with the Coroner’s concerns, and include a requirement to review “the adequacy of the current legislative provisions in ensuring that information which may contribute to improved aviation safety can be effectively and promptly obtained by agencies and communicated between the agencies;” and “the extent to which the interaction, or any overlap, of the respective Acts creates barriers to effective safety action, communication and interaction between CASA and ATSB”.

CASA is known to hold the view that it should have immediate access to ATSB investigation material in order to take corrective action.

While a superficial consideration might conclude that this would be a good thing, a more thorough consideration should leave no doubt that the current separation of the ATSB from the regulator, and the confidentiality provisions contained in current legislation, are vital to the “safety of the fare paying passenger”. As has been demonstrated elsewhere, a failure to ensure the confidentiality of information provided to the investigator would inevitably result in the loss of potentially critical safety information in the future. It is somewhat difficult to reconcile CASA’s new found desire for information after the accident with its (and its predecessors’) failures to act on information held by it before the Seaview, Monarch and Lockhart River accidents.

The independence of the investigator from the regulator, with its associated confidentiality provisions, has for many years been a fundamental part of the global aviation safety system, and any attempt to remove that independence would start us down the slippery path to the culture that allowed the tragic Yogyakarta 737 accident to happen. As a result of that accident, the Indonesian government is moving quickly towards establishing an independent, no blame, investigating agency, with some help from the Australian government. Consequently we await the Miller Report with great interest.

The industry is currently in better shape than it has been for years, despite the current skills shortage, but we have a long way to go before we can hope to achieve our full potential. Hopefully the importance of the industry to the social and economic well-being of the nation will be recognised by the new government, and we will be able to work in partnership with it to the benefit of all Australians.