Originally Posted by
Landflap
Great news. Back to the good old days. Very high standards, centrally well administered. I have held all of the glorious UK licences. PPl, CPL, SCPL, ATPL. (Actually, I recall the latter being called the Air Line Transport Licence (ALTP, rather than ATPL or worse, Americanised ATP ). All centrally administered. If you wanted to fly UK registered aircraft you need a UK licence. What's difficult about that ? Same applied in the USA. Want to fly USA Registered aircraft (?).........get a FAA licence. Want to fly a European Registered aircraft, get a licence issued by the individual European Country's Regulatory Authority. Of course there was recognition. UK licence was world wide admired and obtaining the foreign licence was often the easy matter of obtaining a "validation". Some countries asked for local Air Law paper only. I flew on validations to my Uk gold standard from three seperate European Licensing Authorities and two Middle East. FAA insisted on full writtens but they were REALLY easy multi choice. Of course, and rightly so , Top Class UK CAA did not reciprocate. Quite rightly did not recognise other easy licences and you would need to pass all the difficult writtens.
I see nothing wrong in all of the foregoing and it maintained a very high standard, world recognised Professional qualification process.
We hear a lot of tripe about airspace restriction. UK never stopped other licenced carriers operating in UK airspace. USA & Europe never stopped UK registered aircraft flying in their airspace. Airspace regulation and licence regulation are seperate issues .
And, note to UK CAA (oh love it !) Can we go back to nine fully written exams, not this dumbed down multi choice trash ? For Meteorogy, for example, can we go back to the tough theory (part one) and the really tough practical(pat two) where we had to decode stations, plot a course, plot the isobars & fronts with pressure susytems , decode the actuals and write forecast for destination & alternates (get Buys Ballot all wrong & you would wind up all over the chart. !)
Note to foreign licence Regulators : As the new UK Licences will be the gold standards, we will expect foreign validations by just having to do your local Air Law exam ( not even that required by the Belgians in 1991) and just to be sure, this is for Licencing to fly registered aircraft of THAT country. Nothing, nothing, to do with the confusion of flying in foreign airspace
Finally, of course the new UK LIcence will at last be recognised as University degree acadamic standard, so, can I be first to get my Degree in Civil Aviation. You know, something like "UK CAA Honours, -Hamble " ; then I could put "UKCAA-Ham Hon" behind my name. Ta.
you talk about “Gold Standard”...well, we Belgians find that very amusing, as we had pre-JAR FCL the hardest theory and practical requirements and examinations. You have a point though: current EASA requirements are insulting to our profession. Get back the fully written and oral exams and get rid of multi-choice and question banks! Make the ATPL University level again, but done in 2 years instead of 4 , like before 2000.