Easter is here; a four-day break perfect for planning fly-aways. It's also the perfect trap for unwary fliers. Being at this time of year, the weather can vacillate between accomodating and downright hostile ... sometimes in a matter of hours. With many club excursions starting on Friday and ending on Monday, the time between going away and coming home is enough for the weather pattern to change significantly. Over the years, more than one fly-away has been extended by a day because the group encountered impassable skies on the way home. What fliers need to do is accept now that there's a chance they won't get home, and maybe even word-up the boss that they might not be in on Tuesday. Hopefully, that will ward off any cases of press-on-itis early.
Our new minister for transport Darren Chester has been a very busy person in the last couple of weeks. He's been through a string of briefings on the state of the aviation industry, and my agent in Canberra tells me he's got a few more to come. In a way that's a bit worrying ... exactly who is it that is conducting these briefings? There are a thousand individual opinions out there, each one carried to Canberra in a wheelbarrow pushed by self-interest. How does someone new to a portfolio sort out merit from madness when each one seems to stem from some level of expertise. Well, he has the Aviation Industry Consultative Council (AICC) set-up in December 2014 to work with. The idea of that council was to provide a direct link to the minister so feedback would get there without first going through the filters of CASA, Airservices and the department. With the Prime Minister pulling the trigger on a double-dissolution election (unless the senate caves in), we're bound to find out the results of these briefings in the form of a policy statement before polling day. That will be a good read ...
It has to be a relief for the MRO industry that CASA has decided to retain CAR 4A and update it to suit general aviation. It shows that the hard work done by Ken Cannane and the Aviation Maintenance Repair and Overhaul Business Association (AMROBA) is starting to leave a mark on the blackboards of Aviation House. AMROBA noted early that proposed new regs were simply not going to work if the same rules that applied to RPT aeroplanes were extended to GA. Cannane's work is not yet over (in fact it might be just starting); he and AMROBA will have a lot to do to make sure CAR 4A amendments are not infected with the same silliness that the proposed CASRs were going to have.
In other moves from Canberra, CASA has released guidance material for Part 141. This is the new suite of regs that apply to non-academy flying schools, to define it as simply as possible. Most of these schools and aero clubs have limited resources to deal with this sort of workload, and inevitably it falls to the Chief Flying Instructors to make it all work. That got me thinking. There is plenty of debate in the aviation community about the standard of flight training, especially that given by hour-building instructors who's eyes are more on their own log books than that of their students. So, in some kind of Bizarro World way, we take the best instructors we have (the CFIs) and pin them to their desks under a mass of paperwork. What we need is for them to be out in aeroplanes passing on years of experience. If CASA really wants to do something about flight training, they could always find away to get CFIs out from behind desks and back in aeroplanes. Simples.
May your gauges always be in the green,
Hitch