The woes of the Civil Aviation Authority have continued in the past week with extraordinary comments by former CAA chair Dick Smith that the CAA somehow benefited from more crashes because it got extra money for each crash. Mr Smith is reported to have said there was “”almost a vested interest in the CAA having these planes crash”” because the CAA got extra cash for each crash. The CAA’s acting chief executive, Buck Brooksbank, acknowledged that the CAA had received an extra $6 million since the October 2 Seaview crash, but it had not be a per-crash amount. Rather it had been to swing the deregulatory pendulum back after the “”run-down of experienced regulatory staff, most of which occurred during Mr Smith’s time”.
On this occasion Mr Smith went over the top. It is silly and offensive to suggest that CAA enjoy crashes because they get more money from them. That said there is some merit in the arguments Mr Smith has been putting about air safety over the years and that these arguments need to be tested against others, hopefully with the outcome of a more efficient and equally safe airline industry. Broadly, Mr Smith has argued that there is no such thing as absolutely safe and that safety measures have to be measured against costs, especially for light aircraft. To date Australia has not had a death in a jet crash. At a price the safety required for jets could be required for light aircraft, but no-one could fly them because their cost per seat would be prohibitive. He has argued that there is a vested interest in the aviation industry to sensationalise safety issues so that more money and higher salaries are paid to people who maintain aircraft safety and for pilots. Some of the money would be better spent on allowing airline operators to buy newer and safety aircraft.
Against him, various people in the CAA and elsewhere have argued that Mr Smith’s approach is dangerous and that no compromise should be made with safety. Last week’s spat, in a hyperbolic way, highlight the differences in approach. Hyperbole aside, it is still an important debate in Australia, especially for light aircraft serving regional centres. The fortunate thing is that the debate is continuing and that policy and administration is being changed in response. Up to say, 1989, airline safety was perhaps too costly and too bureaucratic. In the early 1990s, the user-pays, deregulatory approach to air safety perhaps went too far.
Now the pendulum is swinging back to sensible middle ground. Australian has indeed been fortunate that the air-accident death rate or indeed air safety results in general has not been alarmingly different in that time. Australia has an enviable record in air safety. It is worth a certain amount of time money and effort to keep it, but nor should it be thrown away too cheaply. The difficulty with Mr Smith’s approach is that while his view has merit up to a point, while at the CAA he pushed its implementation too far and since then has expressed it in an extreme way _ as his comments last week showed. That does not help air safety.