A long overdue set of revised safety laws for aviation in general in Australia, released for comment by the end of the month by CASA, have some comical provisions.

These include going supersonic while flying under visual flight rules (VFR)  50 Commonwealth penalty units (or $5500). Imagine your average Cessna 172 owner terrified at the thought of accidentally flying as fast as Concorde.

Or failing to see and avoid a collision with another aircraft, the same $5500, except that you will be dead, so they’ll never collect.

Or taking a loaded gun onto a flight ($2250) or “discharging it without pilot permission” ($5500), which seems like a plea bargain if ever, considering the near certainty of being jailed for 20 years for doing either.

Or if you are a pilot, picking up and setting down passengers while in flight.

Never mind the penalty. Jetstar will probably pay you tens of millions of dollars for working out how to do that.

Don’t laugh. This is serious. Australian taxpayers have spent something like 19 years and $150 million on efforts to pull together the essential safety requirements of flight under what is called Part 91 regulations, so the drafting inanities don’t do justice to what is an extremely important regulatory reconstruction of the rules.

While the new rules are the foundations of a critical reform of safety rules in this country, and largely will take immediate effect on general aviation, private owners and small third-tier carriers or charter operations, CASA describes them as setting out the “rules of the road” and emphasises that  all pilots, no matter what they fly, are bound by them.

Which is good to know. You don’t want your friendly captain flying between Melbourne and Sydney to make up time by nudging the Boeing or Airbus past the speed of sound and have odd engine and sections of the wings ripped off while you are trying to work out what exactly is contained in food just put in front of you.

There are some severe real problems with the proposed rules too. One that caused caustic comments from several airline and aviation figures who are reviewing the document concerns penalties for making an emergency or distress call that proves to have been unnecessary.

“This is dangerous,” one consultant said. “International practice is that pilots must immediately report their concerns, not hesitate and ask themselves, will I be fined if I’m wrong.

“It is astonishing that someone as skilled as a pilot as the new CASA CEO (John McCormick) would even consider the inclusion of such a rule and a $5500 fine.”

But maybe McCormick didn’t read that part. CASA is engaged in extremes of delegation at the moment as it tries to break the regulatory impasse that has bedeviled it for decades.

There are a lot of things that need to be sorted out before these rules finally come into effect.