Does anyone have any serious understanding of the effectiveness of "certification" organizations such as ARGUS, etc? Are they valuable or just another expensive marketing tool? It seems to me all they really do is actually check up on items that the FAA should be checking up on anyway. The focus of their reviews or audits or what have you by and large seems to be aimed backwards toward historical safety records, etc. This likely tells us something, but perhaps not a great deal as future performance is not necessarily related to past results, especially amid periods of tumult and turnover in an industry. (This can be really significant at small firms. Airlines have entire organization structures to deal with and fill in for lost personnel. Small firms are sometimes completely reliant on Verne or Clem or some other GOBOB. At a couple firms I've had personal knowledge of, when the good mechanic was there the fleet hummed and pilots felt very confident. When he left, not so much, but the same official paperwork still got completed, so externally nothing would appear any different.) Is anyone scratching his noggin at the value of the information provided by such organizations? It strikes me that most, if not all the information they provide is freely available to anyone willing to look. Granted, there is some value in an easy check of someone else's compilation of the data... but only if that data serves as valid information and tells you something reliable. Does it? Perhaps simply being enrolled one of these programs tells us the firm is profitable enough to pay the audit fee, which tells us something, I suppose. But it doesn't tell us where, specifically, the rest of the cash laying around is being spent.
