I have decided to be philanthropic in my letter to Santa this year. Instead of asking for the usual things – an Aston Martin DB5, a 1996 F33A Bonanza and a Dick Smith action figure – I will instead plead for all the things that General Aviation yearns for. The reasoning behind this is that your correspondent has not been good all year and is unlikely to get what he wants anyway.
Where this plan falls in a screaming heap is that there are so many things GA wants that I doubt old Saint Nick will have the time to read through it before taxiing on Christmas Eve. That’s not our fault; if the Great GA White Paper had contained anything of what we wanted this list wouldn’t have to be made and I might have a chance of getting my Aston. So what I have done is stick with the Top 10 on the basis that Santa is only likely to cough-up two or three of them anyway.
1. An elected government that actually listens to the people that elected it. In reality the whole country could do with this, but the dearth of aviation knowledge among the self-anointed experts in the bureaucracy make it even more critical for GA. (Santa, this one is a prerequisite for all the others!)
2. Subsidies to replace ageing aircraft. Ask yourself this question: how old would the average GA aircraft in Australia be if the subsidies of the 1970s had never happened? Pretty damned old, I’m betting, which itself is proof that they are needed again.
3. A regulator that fosters aviation. The US has one, so why can’t we? CASA continues to bleat about safety being their main priority and that is fair enough, but their punitive nature has nothing to do with safety at all. If it was, they would probably win more court cases.
4. No ASICs for air crew. We are not the ones the government is looking for. All they need to do is mandate the carriage of flight crew licences airside and the problem is solved. The security check on the licence will suffice to expose chinks in the armour and pilots won’t be so disaffected over the whole security thing. See also wish number one.
5. Drug and alcohol programs designed to detect the guilty, not deter the innocent. At the moment the department can crucify you for having a beer at a Christmas hangar party. You are, after all, “available” for aviation duties and that’s all it takes for you to be hung from the yardarm. You don’t actually have to be performing those duties. Could greyer laws have been written?
6. A mentoring system that enables very experienced people to stay in the system rather than be forced to retire because they can’t make CPL medical standards anymore. Flying standards are dropping, and one of the reasons is that we force out experience and teach with inexperience.
7. More airshows and fly-ins! Aviation can be such a happy sport when you’re out there wallowing in aeroplanes and the people who fly them. I concede that they are hard to organise, but that is usually due to a lack of people willing to get stuck into the job. More aviation is better for all of us.
8. A regulatory reform package that actually reforms regulation. At the moment the 22-year-old program looks like achieving nothing of any value to anyone except those employed in drafting them. This issue has the capacity to be Minister Albanese’s biggest pain in the arse for 2011, if we’re lucky.
9. Subsidies and tax exemptions for ADS-B fit-out. Sorry, but this is the only way CASA and Airservices can implement the system with any integrity at all. Somehow, the government policy of “user pays” has, in the case of ADS-B, become “non-user pays”. GA foots the bill so the airlines don’t have to wear the cost ... fairness doesn’t live here anymore.
10. Control and enforcement of the ALOPS agreements. Public airports were handed over to municipal control under certain conditions, but it appears those conditions might have been “non-core”. How is it that in a place like Caboolture ALOPS can be publically violated in writing, yet the Federal Government still pretend that ALOPS is in place? Was there ever any intent to make the agreements work, or was it all about off-loading pesky public assets to ensure an election-winning budget surplus?
I might be just a tad optimistic in asking for this cos Santa’s deadline for wish-lists expired a couple of weeks back. But GA has been very good, very patient with the regulators and participated in every discussion paper and perused every notice of proposed rule making that has come out of Canberra. In other words, we have done all we can to make these things happen; now we need some intervention from the North Pole.
However, there is still one last hurdle that has to be cleared before Santa can even consider delivering our presents. Christmas Day is a Saturday this year. Here’s hoping Santa’s fax doesn’t deliver him a late-Friday Show Cause Notice from CASA on Christmas Eve.
May your bells always jingle,
Hitch