CASA's Safety Agenda
Speech by Mick Toller, Director of Aviation Safety, at SafeSkies 2001, 1 November 2001
CASA's Safety Agenda I think was the title decided between some considerable length of time ago but I think it's a very appropriate one in the circumstances in which we find ourselves today.
Firstly, might I say that I consider it a huge privilege that Peter Lloyd and the committee have asked me to deliver this keynote address at the conference.
I think it's an important statement about the importance of the relationship between the Civil Aviation Safety Authority as the regulator and the aviation industry in Australia and it's a great thrill to me to see so many people here today. I think it's a tremendous turnout and a great credit to the committee, to see so many that are friends both from Australia and from overseas. I have to confess I had a little nostalgia trip last night when the talk was about the A330 and the A340 which aren't that difficult to fly I assure you. In fact, they're very easy to fly but pigs to land, but great aeroplanes nonetheless.
I think it's been said already fairly strongly that we come to this conference at a very difficult time. These are challenging times and I don't need to tell you what they are. We've already heard them enunciated: that we've got the problems that arose out of the September the 11th attacks on the United States; we've got Ansett in administration and all the repercussions that has for the domestic industry; and we also have an election campaign on at the moment.
Now that means, as we've heard, Ken Mathews has certain responsibilities - we're under a thing called 'caretaker convention' at the moment which puts certain restrictions on what can be said and done within the government and within the public service during that period.
Now I want to give you CASA's big picture at the moment and the canvas on which we're painting that picture. The underlying elements that go to creating that picture, and there's some very interesting ones that have changed significantly, probably since the last conference here two years ago.
One of the them is the increased focus that we've got internally and externally in CASA on risk management. I now have an executive risk manager who is responsible for ensuring that everybody in CASA understands and practices risk managements. It's not her job to do it, but to help us to understand it.
I think we all understand the fact that we've driven towards a safety systems approach. We have back, very welcome in our midst, Patrick Hudson today who is going to talk about safety systems - who's just been part of a road show that we've done around Australia which I hope that most of you managed to get to, talking about safety systems. And I'm pleased to say it was a great success.
We're in a situation where we need as an authority to look at business improvement. I spent 30 years in the private sector. Things that have happened in the private sector haven't necessarily happened within the public sector and need to, and we're going through that process at the moment in CASA.
And the final bit is that we're very much aware of the necessity for rigours in government. Corporate governance is the buzz word throughout the private sector but it needs to be the buzz word also within the public sector. Although we don't tend to talk so much about corporate governance, we do need to recognise that the same responsibilities are on those that lead us in the public sector as they are in the private sector and particularly in an authority like CASA which has its Board.
So again for that canvas what are we going to paint with? Well, you know, we've got some quite useful things in our palette. They're all pretty obvious, I think, I hope they're pretty obvious.
First I've put promotion and education. As I've just mentioned Patrick's road show with Professor James Reason and Bruce Byron has just been completed and that's a very important part of what we do.
We've got corporate development issues. What are doing internally to help the industry to develop into a safer industry? We've got the standards that we set and then we've got the necessary adjunct of ensuring that there's compliance with those standards.
So lets look at those issues within the palette one by one.
Two years ago at this conference it was my great pleasure to announce that CASA was introducing the VFR Flight Guide, which was going to be distributed free to all private pilots who didn't hold instrument ratings. I'm delighted to announce today that Version 2 is now back from the printers and is in the process of distribution.
I believe this is a wonderful document in terms of putting in one place easy-to-read text and easy-to-understand pictures that the ordinary pilot needs to refresh on, and from time to time to remember what they need to be doing when they're flying. I commend it to you.
There will be copies for sale for those who aren't entitled to the free ones. But free copies will be going out to everybody who has a GFPT or greater, without having gone through to the instrument rating phase. It will also go to all those holding a current instructor's rating.
And, finally, of course, we use the safety forums. The attendance numbers at these safety forums, which we hold once a year throughout Australia, are quite incredible. We talk sort of 300 here, 600 here, I mean they are enormous numbers of people who give up a significant amount of their time to come and learn about what's happening in aviation and how they can better improve what they do in aviation.
I'll briefly talk about what's happening on the CASA corporate side. We have a corporate plan. We are required by law to have a corporate plan, but that corporate plan now is a pretty robust document. It's got a strong strategic focus. It's measurable.
Corporate plans tend to be pretty dry documents. They're not the sort of thing you'd pick up and read for fun, but nonetheless I do commend it to you. If you wish to see where CASA's focus is for the future this is the way in which we enunciate it. It's Tabled in Parliament, it's accepted by the Minister, and it's our vision for the future.
We've got corporate development issues under way at the moment. We have been low on staff. I think everybody knows that we've been low on staff. That was a necessary part of the changing of CASA.
We're now very close to achieving our establishment. As of the 30th of September we had 665 staff and our total establishment is about 725. We've got about 50 positions being advertised at the moment, but more importantly we are 95% staffed in the compliance section. We are 97% staffed in the standards division, and where we're low is in fact on the corporate services side where we're only staffed up to 77% at the moment so we've put the people at the operational coal front, we're short on the internal support at this stage.
We're taking a strong focus this year on training and development, both in terms of bringing in a new flying training program and a structured flying training program for our flying operations inspectors. We're also recognising the fact that there are a number of other issues that need considerable internal training - that is a strong focus within the authority.
We've undertaken something which has this horrible title, the Function and Resource Analysis, commonly known within the organisation as FRA. We're also just about to start a business improvement program, which has got the rather horrible acronym of ASRIP, the Aviation Safety Regulatory Improvement Program.
The FRA was actually something that I started when I said to people we need to look at what we're doing. We need to be able to say, are we doing what we need to be doing, are we doing it the right way. What are our processes, can we be doing things simpler? In other words, what do we do, how do we do it, how can we do it better.
So the FRA campaign was a strong one. It talked to nearly everybody within the authority about what they saw as problems, how things could be improved. It identified an enormous number of process improvements. It identified some significant cross functional issues, and by that I mean things like IT, which goes right across the organisation. We have some systems which we inherited from the old CAA days that are long overdue, I think, for replacing.
It gave us the ability to focus on some small projects which would give us quick wins. What we're doing to achieve those is empowering the management level to say this is a small thing, I will do it, and giving them more authority than they ever had before to achieve these things.
As for ASRIP, now this is a very big program, and it's a very, very important program as far as I'm concerned. It's a management program that ensures we implement the regulations after they're written. It's not the program that is re-writing the regulations, it's actually focusing on everything being in place for implementation. That's something that is too easy to overlook, that's about training issues, that's about support documentation issues, it's about timing. It's about all these things that have to be considered.
ASRIP's about coordinating our IT across the organisation so that we have the right tools to do the job. It's interesting that we have just won a number of awards world wide for the software that we've put in to run our Regulatory Services Centre, which is a very important part of what we are. I think it's a great tribute to those who've been involved in that project that they have won a number of awards world wide for the software they use.
There's also the coordination of knowledge needs across the organisation, which is partly about making sure that we learn from history and it's partly about ensuring that we enshrine everything that's going on for the future, so that we help those that come after us.
And, finally, it's important to make sure that everything that we do matches up with the concept of the new regulations.
So those are the internal things that are happening within the organisation at the moment.
Now I'll just turn to the sort of things in which you're probably interested, because they affect you more directly.
On the safety standards side, I think you all know that we've had a program going for some years now under various guises. We have just conducted a review of our regulatory reform program which showed basically that although there's a lot of effort going in and a lot of work being done we were predicably, I suppose, short on outcomes. What we've put together is a program which we believe is going to put that train back on its rails again.
Now how do we get there? Well we got there in fact by a significant amount of talking to industry.
Bruce Gemmell, who is my deputy, led this program, and spent a lot of time talking and I think more accurately listening to people in industry. We also put out a number of surveys - I mention three here - the top 70 was what we call 'opinion leaders' throughout Australian aviation. There was a random poll of 1500 people who were associated with industry and there was also a survey of staff opinion on the matter.
What was particularly interesting I think was that these three very different surveys came up with very similar results. Even the staff seemed to think almost the same way as industry and I think that was pretty valid. But we basically asked a number of questions about the reform program in terms of how can we make it better and what are you looking for out of the reform program. The strong focus that came out of what people wanted first was that they wanted the rules easier to handle - easier to find what they needed to find and easier to understand when they'd found it.
The second highest requirement was to remove inconsistencies that existed at the moment. Very near the bottom, interestingly, was to make them more like overseas regulations Although we recognise the fact that it is important that we are in line with the ICAO requirements, in line with international best practice, it's interesting to see that it's not what people regard as a high priority.
What we were dealing with before in regulatory reform was many stated project objectives. These are the things that we have been told at various times that we had to put into the reform program and they're all quite interesting, they're all important. New rules had to be focused on safety of course - I think that goes without saying. And they had to be justifiable.
They also had to be clear, concise and unambiguous, enforceable, consistent with our international obligations and ICAO and harmonised with the overseas requirements wherever possible. They had to be outcome based, not prescriptive. They had to be based on a risk management principle, they had to cost beneficial, they had to be representative of a system approach to safety and they had to allow for delegation of industry where appropriate. These were the things that we were trying to work to.
And I think what the review team recognised was that although these are all laudable they are sometimes contradictory. When you're trying to write new regulations there are many times when you say, well we want it to be like this, but if you make it like this it's not then going to be enforceable or it's not going to be internationally harmonised or it's not going to be based on risk management principles. Weighing up all these different conflicts was causing many of the stresses, I believe, in the reform program going ahead.
So what the review team has come back and said to the Board and myself is that there should be a hierarchy of objectives. In other words we should be saying of all these things when we get these conflicts - what do we put first?
And the aviation people came out with the obvious and said keep it simple. Something we're all comfortable with, we all know, we all understand. Focus on safety and simplicity.
And the other things, important though they are, and I stress that we're not throwing them out the window, but important though they are, should be the secondary items. Simplicity will take precedence in future over enforceability.
We've put that to the Attorney-General's Department. Remember that we actually don't write the regulations. Everybody thinks that poor old CASA writes this stuff, but I assure you we don't. It's actually the office of legal drafting in the Attorney-General's Department. We put simplicity to them with some trepidation I have to say, expecting them to turn around to say, you can't do that, but I'm delighted to say that they have actually embraced this concept and welcomed this concept and significantly will help us to achieve it.
And we've actually given it a motto and that motto - just so that we can all remember what we're talking about - is Safety through Clarity. So the focus that we're bringing to the aviation reform program is going to be safety through clarity.
I'm just going to take two minutes off on a little tangent. The tangent I'm going to go off on is a few CASA myths.
Myths are wonderful things in aviation. I mean if you put two aviators in a bar, one will say something to the other and that becomes a rumour. The next day the second person will repeat it to the third person and say I heard it on a great authority and then it becomes a fact. Of course when it's re-repeated four or five times it is absolute truth and anything that anybody should say to contradict it must be wrong.
So let's very briefly explore this morning just a few of the CASA myths that are going around at the moment just so that we can just lay them to bed and don't have to talk about them again.
The first one is that we've got a vendetta on small operators - absolutely not. We have a risk based program that, as I said earlier, tells us where to focus our attention. We require small operators to maintain standards. I will never apologise for that. I think that is the absolute bottom line.
We don't put many small operators out of business, despite the fact that people suggest that we do. Those that we do are done through a rigorous process, and a rigorous process that is eminently challengeable. There is no policy whatsoever, to have any vendetta whatsoever on small operators. But I do require, and CASA requires and the Board requires, and aviation requires and the public requires, certain minimum standards.
The second one is that we're having a vendetta on aging aircraft. The aging aircraft issue is an important issue. It is one that I've been raising increasingly over the last year, not as an issue for the moment, but an issue for the future. If we don't consider the issues of aging aircraft now, then we're gong to have major problems in 10 years' time. If we don't start looking at what are the various alternatives to what's going on at the moment then there is a brick wall out there that we're going to hit very hard at some time.
The best thing to do is to get the subject out into the open now, to discuss it now, and to try and work out what the various solutions are. But there is no vendetta against aging aircraft.
There's that lovely one that the two Englishmen were trying to align CASA with Europe. I don't get offended easily but getting called an Englishman actually does offend me because I'm not, and never have been. Equally there is no, absolutely no driver, never has been within CASA to align anything with the European rules as against the American rules.
Interestingly when I arrived in CASA back in 1998, one of those tenets was that in general terms the certification of maintenance regulations in the States were pretty good but that the operations rules in Europe tend to be better. That may or may not be the case, but we will look at everything on its merits rather than say because that's European it must be good or equally because it's American it must be good.
The myth that we're driven by enforcement targets - absolutely no way. In fact probably most people don't understand just exactly what we do in in an enforcement role. I had a couple of big forums recently where we got into discussions about this accusation that CASA is sort of judge, jury and executioner. There was an element of truth in it and I'll be the first to admit it. It is not out of choice. It is what is written in the Civil Aviation Act and this is what Parliament has told us to be. It's not what we necessarily want to be.
But I asked the people just how many prosecutions they thought were undertaken against aviation regulations in a year. Now two points here. For the first CASA does not prosecute. CASA passes briefs of evidence to the Director of Public Prosecutions and it's the Director of Public Prosecutions who decides whether a prosecution should go ahead or not. But the general sort of feeling that most people had was that prosecutions were probably high hundreds, maybe in the thousands and we're probably doing several a day.
If you read our annual report for 2000/2001 which will be tabled in Parliament fairly shortly, you will read that we actually sent 30 briefs to the Director of Public Prosecutions last year. This includes a not an insignificant number on air rage. So this idea that we're out there standing behind a tree waiting to jump out on top of people and prosecute them I'm afraid is a myth.
And the final myth which is going around at the moment is that we were the inventors of strict liability and that we're taking the industry that way. Not so. Strict liability is government policy. Strict liability is about fault and whether fault shows that there is intent or not. In fact it's entirely within the Attorney-'General's Department and CASA has no input to it whatsoever and that's important.
Moving on briefly, to safety compliance issues. It is important that we be consistent, important that we take a system approach. Although we push to a certain extent the fact that we are doing system auditing, it doesn't mean to say we stopped product auditing. You need the two together but we had to get across the concept of system auditing and we need to use our limited resources wisely. We haven't got unlimited resources and we have to use them wisely.
I want to talk very briefly about air operators certificates because they're an important part of the structure of the aviation industry.
They're required, under section 27 of the Civil Aviation Act. They've got to be there. CAR 206 actually prescribes which activities require an AOC and CAR 206 is one of the banes of my life. I think most people will understand why it's an incredibly difficult regulation to actually be in charge of, but it basically says that anything that's aerial work, charter or regular public transport requires an air operators certificate.
Part of AOC's is the compliance statement is a statement which tells us where in the paper work of an operator they've actually addressed all the issues that need to be addressed under the regulations and for compliance with the Act. There are what I call fringe operations, fringe activities. Aerial photography is a classic which is one which says, well, yes, strictly speaking under the regulations it needs an AOC but I mean really, does it, and what are we achieving by that?
We've had recent controversy about the issue of AOCs for sports aviation commercial training schools. That's really not about the sports aviation community training its members and being a sports aviation community, it's about when you drive past an airport and there are two billboards there and one says come and fly this aeroplane for $135 an hour because it's a VH registered aircraft and there's another big billboard for an equally large school which says come and fly this aeroplane for $85 an hour because it's an AUF registered aeroplane.
How can we simplify AOCs without reducing the standards is the question that I've asked myself against that backdrop of those issues, against the clear enunciation of industry views from all segments against what is clearly the Minister's view of the matter. How can we make life simpler? So basically the Board and I got together and scratched our heads and came up with a few things which we believe can make CASA's role more practical.
The initiatives that we are proposing as a board are that for aerial work we're going to undertake a review of the requirements for AOCs. I've already commissioned that review. We're at the draft terms of reference stage at the moment, and that will be undertaken within the next two months. The possible outcome of that, and in fact I believe the hoped for outcome, is going to be a much simpler system of certification for aerial work.
And there's even the possibility and I would not pre-empt this review, that it could come out and say that there is no requirement for certification. But it's something that we'll be looking at very closely.
I think there are ways that we can help the RPT and charter market as well. I think that an idea that we're strongly pursuing at the moment is that there be a generic AOC for aircraft below 5700 kilos. I'd like to see a situation whereby the paperwork that's currently required to change aircraft types when they're below 5700 kilos is significantly reduced. It doesn't mean to say it doesn't have to be done by the operator but does it have to be done by us? And let's review the period of issue. Do we need three years for an AOC or do we need one year for an AOC. Do we need a period at all, and I think that's a very important point. One other thing that we're producing at the moment is generic manuals so that everybody can just pick up the generic manual.
So therefore, in summary, what we're talking about is in terms of the aviation safety standards and the development of them, safety through clarity. In terms of how industry can work, simplifying the AOC procedures.
The result of that will be, if it works, greater compliance by industry - which means a safer industry and more contact time for our inspectors. They can get out, they can be doing more flight testing, more checking, and that has also got to be of great value to the future standards of this industry.
Thank you.