I’ve made an interesting personal conclusion about the general aviation industry in Australia.

It appears that small (micro) businesses employing up to five people and medium to large sized businesses employing 20 or more employees can be successful.  Those small businesses with between 5 and 20 employees appear to struggle.  I am informed that one significant problem is the cost of conformity with customer requirements and compliance with government regulations.

I have been often engaged to assist these businesses to ‘get out of trouble’, or to assist them in getting the better contracts or just to do something which will enable the owners to enjoy more than just wages.

Many aviation operators are required to establish certified Quality Assurance Systems, Workplace Health and Safety Systems (SMS), Environmental Systems and of course Safety Management Systems to enable them to compete for contracts with larger companies.  These systems are a financial impost but, apparently, these days any business needs a larger contract to properly fund operations.

Whilst these systems all have some value, collectively, if one is not careful, they will not be used properly and fall into full or partial disuse until the next contract or scheduled audit.  I assume that the intended consequence is to ultimately improve safety, but in many cases, the resource impost of maintaining these systems can be detrimental to safety.  Some aviation tender requirements at best amount to a naïve and clumsy attempt to assess the safety potential of an aviation operator.

My observations confirm that some small businesses really end up with a number of disparate systems but one no system operating as it is intended.  In my opinion, it may be prudent to operate a SMS properly or even combine it with a Workplace Health and Safety System (there are synergies), rather than have a number of disparate systems which might look impressive on a tender document, but cost lots of money and are quite ineffective in practice. 

I’ll reserve my comments about the cost of regulatory compliance for another BLOG.

Larger companies and Government consumers of aviation services need to carefully consider the risks that they are trying to control and the safety outcome rather than select aviation businesses on the basis of an ill-considered and trendy wish list.