When I worked in the Arctic there was always the fear of an inspector hiding behind every 45-gallon drum. Then when I joined Transport, I realized they weren't. They don't do that. They don't want to regulate.
Air Transat is a perfect example of how an SMS system would have worked, could have worked, and it should have been studied to death. That whole thing was luck. If that airplane had gone another 10 minutes before the fuel chafed through the fuel line, they'd all be dead. Nobody would be here right now talking about this; it would be all new people. That wasn't studied. There was no enforcement investigation into that as required by ICAO. They cut the cheque over the phone and then they did the enforcement investigation. It was just a paper exercise on one of the biggest potential disasters we'd ever had. It was sheer luck.