As I understand it, the new regs were driven by CAA, altough I don't know at who's instigation.
I agree that the standard must be kept high or preferably raised and I just did all my renewals last week, but the examiner must be appropriate to the testing done.
Eg. 3000 hours around the windsock at GC should enable a guy to DE for Grade IIIs, Grade IIs and VFR CPL tests. What more do we need ? However for a twin IF rating you will need a guy with more heavyweight experience.
The problem here I think is the usual one of trying to treat helicopter pilots like fixed wing pilots because there's little or no helicopter experience at the CAA these days. 250 hours twin and 100 hours IF is okay for an aeroplane driver, indeed most guys get this pretty quickly if they are doing any sort of transport flying but it's not the same story on the Rotor wing side. Even the likes of guys at Portnet must take a long time to get 100 of IF.
The point though is that it falls to us to take up the issue with CAA as to be fair, they can't be expected to think for us. The current DEs are mostly ex SAAF and are usually airline so they don't have much of feel for the 'normal' heli CPL.
I will call CAA this afternoon, as invited, and see what comes out of the meeting. Depedning on this, perhaps we can mount some sort of exercise to give CAA a better picture of how we, the consumers, think this could be done ?