Originally Posted by
Olympia 463
Cats%,
If you read my post 3790 you will realise that I am a very old (never bold) glider pilot. My last flying in gliders was in 2007 (at Portmoak oddly enough) so I missed all this stuff about gliders going on the register. I was merely trying to point out how simple things were in days of yore before the pen-pushers got their hands on gliding. The accident rate has not improved over recent times so what has been the point of introducing more paperwork?
The accident rate very definitely has improved. Whether this is to do with flying standards, aircraft safety or increased regulation I wouldn’t want to say. But gliding is now safer than it was.
Rightly or wrongly gliding is now more regulated than it once was, but the paperwork burden is hardly onerous. In fact the latest Pilot-Owner Maintenance and CS-STAN creations by EASA give a surprisingly large field to play on in terms of working on one’s own aircraft and making minor modifications.
Of course the Viking fleet is not subject to any of this, but the fact of the matter still stands that the lack of proper paperwork would have seen them grounded under any airworthiness system. You simply can’t fix aeroplanes and not write it down.