On Fri, May 04, 2012 at 11:00:54AM +1000, Mike Cleaver wrote: > Many people rail against "certification" for gliders and say we do not > need it. Would they likewise say that we should all be able to go out > and buy a car that had not been shown to meet the Australian Design > Rules?
Yes -- I'd like to buy a car that has not been shown to meet the Australian Design Rules. The Ariel Atom looks excellent :-) Anyone who has imported a car knows that the Australian Design Rules are more about market protectionism than safety. You can have your imported car declared unroadworthy due to so many technicalities it's ridiculous. For example, window tinting: I can take a car manufactured in Australia and take it to a workshop to get self-adhesive window tint applied. But if I import a car I'll have to have any tinting removed before it'll be certified as roadworthy, at which point I'll be able to take it to the same workshop to have the same tinting reapplied. Unless the manufacturer tinted the windows at the factory of origin, in which case tinting is perfectly okay, even if it's darker than that which is permitted by Australian rules. The child restraint story is even worse: The Australian standard has mandated a standard that's worse than the international standard, and child seats which conform to the superior international standard have been banned in Australia for years. > I doubt it, as the liability issues are far greater with a car > because of the number of "innocent bystanders" they expose is a much > bigger number. Surely that's mostly an insurance issue? It's not like cars designed to other country's roadworthiness standards spontaneously explode and kill innocent bystanders; We're talking about pretty marginal residual risk here. > So what does certification do? It identifies that the > individual airframe conforms to a known and proven standard, giving at > least a partial guarantee that it has no known design defects and will > presumably be able to be sold to someone else in future without leaving > the seller with any residual responsibility. We buy and sell vintage aircraft that predate the certification standards, and experimental aircraft with no certification standards at all, all the time without that being a problem. What's a "partial guarantee"? > (Most experimental > aeroplanes in the US are never sold to a second owner - even if > perfectly serviceable they are simply abandoned when the owner/builder > retires either themself or the aircraft from flying.) I don't think that's at all true. Do a search on any of the aviation classifed sites for experimental homebuilt types - Vans, Sonex, Glassair... there's a burgeoning market for them. Most homebuilt kits change hands several times between their original delivery and their first flight too. Vans reckons only about 20% of their kits are completed by same person who ordered the first kit. > It also provides > protection to the original buyer that the manufacturer takes > responsibility for the design and is required by law to report any known > problems and issue service bulletins to resolve them Until they go broke, at which point the owner is only their own every bit as much as they'd have been if they'd built it themselves. > It all depends on how much responsibility you are willing, or are > permitted by society, to assume on your own shoulders - and society is > often unnecessarily restrictive on the individual in an effort to > protect the majority against the very few who would be classed as > psychopaths, or even those who exploit the weaknesses of others to an > unreasonable extent for personal gain. The problem is defining what is > reasonable!!! IMHO the problem is increasingly the fact that everyone is automatically classed as a psychopath unless they have a certificate saying otherwise. - mark _______________________________________________ Aus-soaring mailing list [email protected] To check or change subscription details, visit: http://lists.internode.on.net/mailman/listinfo/aus-soaring
