And

*Because [the exam is] written by bureaucrats, there's no real relevance to what you actually do in the field to what you learn in the exam*. (P\_10)


**Table 6.** Summary of findings for Work as Imagined vs. Work as Done theme.

Alternatively, some views ascribed increasing importance to the role of theory in training, "nowadays, employers are wanting to see the apprentices actually complete all their theory before they'll want to take them on" (P\_2). Similarly, work experience was heralded as a mechanism that provided practical knowledge, and a fforded knowledge acquisition in a way that learning of theory could not:

*[Work experience] giving the apprentices the appreciation as to what it is actually like in the working environment, I think there's a lot of benefit in that. Yeah and in my case, it led into an apprenticeship at the end of it. I highly recommend that apprentices and people in the airline industry do that*. (P\_2)

However, work experience in the form of on-the-job training was also felt to be a platform that could easily teach and transmit bad habits:

*I think, go back many years it was all on the job training, and so the bad habits that an engineer taught to another engineer, taught to another engineer, taught to another. Just got passed down and then got even made worse to the point where you have an apprentice who's being taught by someone whose got a license, yet the work's crap*. (P\_4)

*Restrictive maintenance manuals* were given as a specific example of how work as imagined seldom translated into how work was actually done. Maintenance manual logic and perceptions of compliance were considered to be incongruent with what was required in practice, therefore considered restrictive, *inflexible*, demand certain skills, and *require interpretation* in ways that ultimately made them very unwieldy.

*You read the maintenance manual and it just says, "Fix it." There's no interpretation, you know? [* ... *] Quite often the manual will give you all of the information you need to know on how to build it from the nut up, but you're not doing that. You need to dive into that particular part that you're involved with, you know? Then use the manual to repair it from there, not from go to whoa. Understanding the manual and interpreting it is a real challenge*. (P\_3)

... *having this mindset that the regulator tells you that you are not to refer to anything mentally. You are to refer to a manual to do any servicing and maintenance*. (P\_10)

### *3.5. Practical and Operational Challenges for GA*

As shown in Table 7 the last major theme in the study (representing 27% of all coded data) was centered around the *Practical and Operational Challenges for GA*. Following on from notions given within the forgoing theme, a key element here was the perceived *mismatch between GA and the commercial aviation sector*. Due to this, *regulation and compliance was seen to have a poor fit* and calibration with GA and small operators:

*[In] Australia, unfortunately, you haven't really learnt from the mistakes made in the UK, so they're trying to make the General Aviation industry the same as the [commercial] airline industry, which doesn't work [* ... *] [they] are very di*ff*erent ballgames*. (P\_9)


**Table 7.** Summary of findings for Practical and Operational Challenges for the GA theme.

By modelling GA on the commercial airline sector, regulation and compliance was felt to be impractical, counterintuitive, and cause restrictiveness in some scenarios, for example when resources were stretched:

*"One of the problems is we do a lot of the maintenance on vintage aircraft, and some of the parts just, you can't get a new part with a release note and then there's perfectly good serviceable parts that are available from the parts bin. You're not allowed to use it theoretically*; (P\_7)
