The country's air-safety investigation bureau has been castigated in its handling of an inquiry into the ditching of an air-ambulance plane in the sea off Norfolk Island in November 2009.
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Releasing its final report on Thursday, a senate committee has called for the Australian Transport Safety Bureau to reopen its investigation into the night-time ditching of the Pel-Air Westwind jet after it ran out of fuel.
The two crew and four passengers of the air-ambulance jet survived the ditching but some, including a nurse, were left with lasting injuries.
The plane's captain, Dominic James, who had previously gained fame as a Cleo Bachelor of the Year candidate, has sought to clear his name.
The senate committee said that it believed the bureau's processes had become deficient.
It also took a ''dim view'' of the failure by the air-safety regulator, the Civil Aviation Safety Authority, to provide the ATSB with ''critical documents''.
The documents demonstrated CASA's ''failure to properly oversee'' the operations of Pel-Air, a unit of the ASX-listed airline Regional Express.
The committee, which includes independent senator Nick Xenophon, said it was ''deeply worrying'' that many people feared retribution from CASA if they aired their concerns in public. It issued a veiled warning to the regulator that it would be keeping a close eye on whether anyone who gave evidence suffered ''adverse consequences''.
The committee's 26 recommendations also include a demand for the ATSB to retrieve ''without further delay'' the black-box flight recorders from the wreckage of the Pel-Air plane, which lies in waters off Norfolk Island.
It is also pushing for the establishment of a panel of aviation safety experts to ensure quality control of the ATSB investigation and reporting processes.
The committee said it was surprised by the ATSB's ''near exclusive focus on the actions of the pilot and lack of analysis or detail of factors that would assist the wider aviation industry''.
''It is disappointing that CASA and the ATSB continue to assert, in the face of evidence to the contrary, that the only part of the system with any effect on the accident sequence was the pilot,'' it said.
''The committee was understandably troubled by allegations that agencies whose role it is to protect and enhance aviation safety were acting in ways which could compromise that safety."
