The Regulator

“We consult, but we do not consult to consensus. I don’t think we’ll ever get consensus in this aviation industry.”

McCormick has quickly set about providing the organisation with clear directions, and communicating with industry what CASA’s roles and functions are (and shouldn’t be), and has shown a willingness to address problem areas, such as the long running regulatory review program, but also a readiness to go in to bat to defend CASA and its people.

“I think what there needs to be is a clear stated aim of where we want to go, of what the areas we need to address are, which to me are the policies and processes that we have in place, the structure we have to support the primary function, which is to regulate aviation safety, with the safety of air navigation being our prime consideration, according to the Civil Aviation Act,” McCormick told Australian Aviation in a recent interview in his Canberra office.

“And then we have to show people that’s what we’re going to do, support people as best you can, provide them with the tools and the training and the aim, and then get out of their road and let them get on with it. ” “CASA’s not blameless,” McCormick noted, “we’re like any other organisation, public or private, where some things we do very well and some things we haven’t done as good as we could have, and we will improve. And that’s what we’re about, we’re about continual improvement and improving the governance of the organisation, improving the skills of our people, making sure we focus again on the core of activity which is the regulation of aviation safety, nothing else, and that we complete regulatory reform in a timely fashion. They’re the four things I’ve set out to do and they are the things that we will work through in time. ” The new CASA head comes to the job as a well regarded and highly credentialled pilot. McCormick began his aviation career with a decade in the RAAF from the mid 1970s, becoming a fighter combat instructor (FCI) on the Mirage. He then flew for Qantas for three years before joining Cathay Pacific, where his career took him from a 747-200 first officer to roles including the flight training manager for the TriStar, co-leading the 777’s introduction into service, 747-400 flying training manager, Boeing fleet chief pilot, and from 2002 to 2006, general manager operations, where he had responsibility for regulatory compliance, including the airline’s AOCs.

In 2006 he returned to flying as a senior training captain on the A330 and A340, before joining CASA in March this year.

Based in Brisbane, McCormick flies his own single-seat aerobatic Yak-50, which is a regular visitor to airshows and fly-ins.

It’s a strong CV, but it is his experience at Cathay as general manager operations that has perhaps best prepared him for the CASA role, and given him an international perspective on how aviation regulators should and shouldn’t operate.

That international experience, he says, gives him a broader perspective on the acrimonious debate that often surrounds aviation regulatory matters in Australia.

“I’m just continually amazed that in a place that has a relatively small amount of aviation, compared say to the United States, that for some people and different sectors of the industry here the word ‘compromise’ is not in their lexicon. They’re quite prepared to fight to the last man standing over the most minuscule of unimportant points, and they hold positions with such strength that the discussions I’ve heard rapidly go to the personal, they play the man, not the ball.

“I find that just totally amazing that there are people that see things with such blinding clarity of black and white, when aviation is not black and white, and a lot of people should look around the world and to places where this is a lot of aviation to see how things have moved. ” But why, knowing this history of a sometimes acrimonious relationship between theindustry and its regulator, take on the CEO role at CASA? “I took the job because I wanted it, I wanted to do something for the aviation industry as far as the regulatory reform goes,” McCormick said. “My interests are in around aviation, around regulation, and around flying, I like flying. ” “I think coming into CASA, it’s a good organisation, regardless of what some less informed people want to put out there in the public domain. They’re entitled to their opinion, but I’ll support this organisation to the end. Sure, there are some areas we could have improved, and we will, some service delivery areas we could have improved, and we will. But there’s a myriad of things where people in the industry quite rapidly say ‘CASA did this and CASA did that’, when in fact the facts don’t bear that out.

“People just run off in this ill-informed manner, and I think that’s a shame, I think the Australian industry, the Australian public, deserve better than that. ” Nonetheless, McCormick has quickly set about making improvements to how CASA operates by instigating a restructure of the regulator to more closely align its activities with the requirements of the Civil Aviation Act. The new structure took effect on July 1, and saw the creation of six operational divisions: standards development and future technology; CASA operations (merging the airline and GA operations functions); safety analysis and education; airspace and aerodrome regulation; industry permissions; and legal services. As well as these operational areas there will also be a corporate services area, an Office of the Director of Aviation Safety, and a new Permission Application Centre will be formed by merging the current Brisbane based service centre with the licensing and registration centre.

“I know that (when a new boss) comes in you’re supposed to change things around – ‘new broom sweep clean’ – (but) I haven’t changed a great deal, there’s only about 100 odd people who are physically changing jobs. But what we’ve done is to align our functions closer to what the Civil Aviation Act requires us to do, so now there is a direct linkage between functionality and the Act, and they all relate around safety functions and promoting safety and regulating it. ” The message is clear, says McCormick: “Our primary focus should just be on aviation safety, we’re a regulator,” he states.

“We have to make sure that people have a priority in the work they do and what they do and how we go about doing it, and my statement to all staff has been is we’re either actively promoting aviation safety, or regulating aviation safety, or we are supporting someone who is actively promoting aviation safety or regulating aviation safety, or it’s not our job.

“We do a lot of things and have done for many years which we’ve grown up with organically – to me they’re not our jobs, we’ve got to get out of those things. Some things haven’t been our choice, some things we have to do because we’ve been given them, some that aren’t very popular like the ASIC card that wasn’t a CASA program – we were given that program so it’s ours to administer, there’s nothing we can do about that. ” With a realigned structure in place, the focus now is on bedding down those changes and refining CASA’s processes and procedures.

“We’re in the process of mapping out all the processes and procedures we have, because process and procedures, even though it my be something from the 1960s, are what a regulator is about. We’re about standards, and we’re putting back some more emphasis on to that. ” But other than that realignment of functions, McCormick says he has no plans to make big changes to how CASA operates, with its corporate headquarters located in Canberra and the new operations headquarters at Brisbane Airport which opened just over a year ago.

“One of the reasons I see that (the old Department of Civil Aviation moved from Melbourne to Canberra) was that it was deemed to be too close to industry, then we moved to Brisbane because we were deemed to be too far away from industry. I don’t think I wish to perpetuate that cycle!”

“We’re about standards, and we’re putting back some more emphasis on to that. ”

“I will not be moving Brisbane or Canberra, that would be a waste of money to do that at this time. ” He says what is more important than where the major offices are is CASA having field offices in regions where there is a lot of aviation activity.

“Being a statutory authority we obviously have to be in Canberra to be near our masters, but what we do need to do is get more presence out in other places, and that’s why we are going to open up more work stations in northwestern Western Australia, the Northern Territory and northern Queensland, where the ATSB tells me there are a considerable number of accidents and unfortunately loss of life.

So to me where the main buildings are, ie Brisbane and Canberra, isn’t really relevant, it’s where the actual work is being done. ” That ties into in a renewed focus from CASA on regional, GA, and recreational aviation.

“The commuter/regional operation is the area of concern, that’s where there has been some nasty accidents, and we will look very seriously at that sector. ” “In the past we’ve had a focus on the big end of town, and quite rightly,” McCormick said. “To me a life is a life. Unfortunately the smaller end of town, they tend to above about an accident a week, they often can be fatal, because a lot of those structures are not built to FAR 25 standards, they don’t have 16 g crash resistant seats, etc, so you can say ‘oh well that’s a person undertaking an activity and they know the risk involved and that’s that’, but if you say there’s 10 to 20 people killed a year, in afew years’ time you’ve lost the equivalent of a 737 load of people. I can’t sit here and let that happen, that’s why my focus is more across the board. ” One way that focus is realising itself is in shepherding through self administration for sport aviation.

“If there’s 10 to 20 people killed a year, in a few years’ time you’ve lost the equivalent of a 737 load of people. I can’t sit here and let that happen. ”

“As we speak we have the first sports aviation forum meeting downstairs, which we’ve put together to bring together all those different organisations into self administering organisations, to get them aligned into where we see the relationship going. Sports aviation and those particular bodies represent 47 per cent of the aviation activity in Australia, so they’re not exactly a small part of the world, so I think we need to put some more emphasis there where in the past we’ve tended not to, we’ve focused on the big end of town. ” Another key focus for the new CASA boss is pushing through the oft delayed and much maligned regulatory review program.

“I think if you look at regulatory reform, over the years it has been very much swayed in different directions by industry pressure or interest groups, and that’s not a bad thing, but there comes a time when you’ve got to make a decision. And I would say in some of these areas we perhaps had consulted a lot further than the reasonable man in the street would expect us to consult to, and I’m not sure it has produced the best result. ” How CASA consults with industry is proving one of McCormick’s key themes.

“We have to consult, we will continue to consult with industry at all levels, through things like the Standards Consultative Committee,” McCormick said, “we consult, but we do not consult to consensus. I don’t think we’ll ever get consensus in this aviation industry. ” “I’m not going to consult to consensus, because I can’t do it, and I think that is where this organisation has bogged down in the past. ” Instead, “We will consult with everybody who wants to make some comment, we will meet with the Standards Consultative Committee, with the relevant stakeholders, and we will take on board what somebody has to say, but in the end somebody has got to make a decision. Otherwise we can spend years talking about things and not actually doing anything – we’ve proven

“In the past we’ve had a focus on the big end of town, and quite rightly, but a life is a life. ”

what happens if you don’t make a decision, and I’d actually like to make a decision.

“There’s been this great sway in the industry about what the regs should look and feel like. To me in the end it needs to be black letter law. It could be outcome based, and I think the Trade Practices Act is a good example of outcome based (regulation), but in some areas it needs to be prescriptive, and we need to ‘say that’s what the reg is going to be’, and do it, and move on. ” Explains McCormick, “The Civil Aviation Act, if you take that as our primary Act, prescribes what we can do. Well that’s all we can do, we can’t do anything else.

“So our world in some respects is pretty easy, we have been bogged down in striking this balance in some of the regulatory reform areas that dragged on for years. Again, no criticism of anybody involved, but I think that was because in some respects we were too close to what industry wanted, we were pulled one way then another way. We do need to take on people’s concerns, and while we’re not an economic regulator and I’m not allowed to be an economic regulator, I’m not here to put people out of business.

But in the end we’ll make a decision, and that will be what the rule will be. If we find we’re wrong, I’ve got no ego (riding) on this, we will change it, but we’ve got to do something, we’ve got to put something on paper. ” The federal government’s National Aviation Policy Green Paper sets out a target date of completing the reg reform program by the end of 2010, although that may change with the finalised White Paper, due for release before the end of this year.

“I think the Green Paper date was a good idea, and it’s very good to have a target, and I will look for direction in the White Paper.

We will finish it with all possible speed,” said McCormick, who also committed to ensuring regulations continue to be revised to ensure their relevance.

“I think we’d need to revisit all of them in time. You don’t just finish reg development and declare victory. They’ve got to be living documents, because part of the process is not only writing new regulations, it is getting rid of the ones that exist that are no longer relevant and are out of date. ” For now, CASA is continuing to draft “Part 121/135, the high capacity RPT and commuter operations, that’s where our focus is after the Part 145 maintenance set get out there. And then there are other areas that we will write the regulations, for instance the sport aviation self administrative people will go under a Part 149, that’s just about ready to go. ” Beyond the regulatory reform program and organisational structuring, further changes for the regulator may come as the new CASA board begins to meet, with one of its key tasks assigned by Infrastructure and Transport Minister Anthony Albanese being to provide CASA with strategic guidance. As well as the regulatory reform program, McCormick offered airspace implementation and future CASA funding models as other areas where the new board may offer direction.

“But of course (new chair) Dr Hawke will have his own view. ” Minister Albanese announced the CASA board on June 29.

To be chaired by former Department of Transport secretary Dr Alan Hawke, it also includes fromer Boeing Australia boss David Gray as deputy chair and lawyers Trevor Danos and Helen Gillies.

If the new CASA board does direct CASA to implement a new airspace policy, that contentious area could prove to be the first big test for CASA’s “consult but not to consensus” style.

For now though, there is much else to do.

“At the moment we are more focused internally on getting ourselves understanding what we do, understanding the way we do it, looking at what we should be doing, and making those changes, bedding down the new structure, working with the new board, and looking at the next budget cycle,” Mc- Cormick said.

“I can’t do anything about the past, I can only do something about the future, and we are improving, and we are getting better, and I’ll defend this organisation. I’ve dealt with many, many regulatory authorities around the world and I can tell you, from the international perspective, we are by no means as bad as some here would portray us to be. ”

“There’s been this great sway in the industry about what the regs should look and feel like. To me in the end it needs to be black letter law.