The only organisation in the UK with an uninterrupted knowledge and expertise in Airworthiness Regulation now is the CAA
Hmmmmmmm........... No Comment
No, I will say something, the CAA is a shadow of its past, gutted from what was an excellent and knowledgeable institution often manned by licenced personal that knew their business, this has been replaced by a shambolic and vastly undermanned organisation of civil servants on the whole that was cut to the core as services transferred to EASA and are now expected to regain those lost skills and knowledge with a vastly undermanned staff.
Areas once the backbone of common sense and safety have been thrown to the wind like confetti, an example is the Light Aircraft Maintenance Programme or LAMP as it was known.
True it had its faults, but it was the backbone of maintenance in setting minimum inspection requirements on aircraft and ensuring the GA fleets in the UK were maintained to a set standard, all be it what could be seen as a minimum, but never the less a standard.
Gone, now you might think what are we using now, the manufacturer’s schedules? No, we are having to write our own maintenance programmes, which really means several things, standardisation is gone and the ability for different companies to maintain one aircraft with the minimum of disruption to a standard has disappeared, programmes could be written to do even less and err towards being financially oriented against safety.
Additionally the main driver behind this appears to be to be to protect the CAA from being sued by pushing the responsibility for airworthiness onto the "customer" as opposed to the authority, It also makes it harder for companies to maintain a visiting aircraft, the idea that the maintenance company that looks after an aircraft has to provide their maintenance programme they have spent monies on producing to a competitor, so that they can use it sort of throws the idea and legality of intellectual property to the wind.
Even the CAA so called less regulation is creating more as one finds oneself having to write maintenance programmes for all the aircraft under ones control, and that is an individual program for every individual aircraft as well as changing the format of the schedules, but also rewriting the companies exposition and then re applying to continue to do the same thing........ And don't ask about Licences.
The CAA are not the be all and end all of it, and no matter how much paperwork you throw at it, safety does NOT improve, in fact the opposite, those that never did the job correctly in the first place will simply ignore the latest paperwork trail and carry one as before, while those who are diligent will find themselves with more onerous legislation to plough through with no advantages.
Hey that was almost a rant....
