A hearing  by a Senate inquiry into pilot training and air safety in Australia has adjourned in confusion after the CEO of CASA, John McCormick, said there were no current show cause notices against major Australian carriers but did not clarify whether any had been recently issued.

The hearing had been scheduled at short notice to hear testimony from Tiger Airways, which was served with a show cause notice in March, and which McCormick confirmed had not yet been resolved.

McCormick was put on the spot as to whether such notices had been served against other regular public transport carriers by Senator Nick Xenophon, giving the partial answer that there were none current. But a row then broke out among the committee members over other issues raised by the chair, Senator Bill Heffernan.

His information concerned a set of 25 possibly improper borrowings of air operator certificates by various general aviation training or charter operators at Bankstown Airport, and the dismissal of one of two CASA employees entrusted with regulatory oversight at the airport.

Heffernan was in the process of asking CASA CEO McCormick as to why the dismissed CASA employee had not been prosecuted for improper use of his public office when the session went in camera, then appeared to come back to life on the live video broadcast of the proceedings, and then after a contest between live microphones and piped music, was replaced by the meeting adjourned screen.

Fortunately there was no sign of school parties in the committee room watching parliament work on this occasion.

It is Crikey’s understanding that some senators have been told that show cause notices had been issued to at least two major Australian airlines by CASA, and it appeared from the video linked proceedings that CASA was unable to answer the rather simple and direct question as to who they were, which would have lead to the obvious follow up question as to why they had been issued such serious notices.

Before the session ended abruptly Heffernan also raised the issue of the Goulburn Flight Training Centre having a CASA employee as one of its directors.