YouNeverStopLearning, I think you are being a bit harsh to the CAA re checking. They don't pay lip service to it, I reckon they dont do it at all, because they cant.
If you claimed to have hired an aeroplane in the USA just how could the CAA check even if they wanted to? The FBO there would hardly be interested in wasting time looking up in archives to see how many hours Joe Blow flew in 1987, and how could they say that they had found all the hours he might have flown, their figures could never be guaranteed without a judicial style inquiry. If I asked you how many hours you had flown in G-ABCD just how long would it take you to pull those figures out of your logbook? Ages probably. If the CAA did this on a regular basis, or even very occasionally, the staff at flying clubs would have to spend their entire lives trawling thru ancient auth sheets and aircraft logs and doing no real work. Co-operation with the CAA would very soon cease altogether. We all know that this simply does not happen (checking, not co-operation)
One pilot I know is widely recognised as having falsified hundreds of P1 jet transport hours in one non UK company, and yet more hours in another Asian company that he/she never even worked for at all, yet no effort appears to have been made by the employer to check these apparently easily verifiable allegations. It was easier to put the bastard on near permanent gardening leave rather than face allegations of "harrassment".
Equally, I know pilots who have flown 160 hrs per month in G- reg private cat aircraft on public transport charters which were known to the CAA. No action was taken on either count. How did their logbooks reflect those hours? Here is an event easily verified, yet nothing was done. What chance do we have?
And again, I know a company that flew a fleet of aircraft(perhaps still does) ALL of which had no-go defects that pilots were forbidden (by order of the boss) to report in the tech log. Again, the CAA knew, but did not act. It was too much trouble. If the CAA is happy to turn a blind eye to a fleet of non-airworthy public transport aircraft what chance is there for dealing with a few parker pen hours?
I say again, this all comes down to trust, and when we get crooks in a trusting system they either flourish, or the trusting system has to be dismantled and replaced with sonething far less attractive, and ultimately far less worthy of trust. Sadly I see that day being not far off, but even worse I fear members of the public will have to die before this situation is addressed.
Yes, shopping them might work, but at the expense of some wrongly accused, and no doubt some maliciously accused too. Even so, how do you imagine the CAA would be able to spare the time and effort to verify these claims. Sadly, I fear they could not without increasing the cost of licence issue tenfold. Do you think that would be acceptable?
I do not have a solution to this pronlem, but if I found one of these creeps myself Id be tempted to a vigorous application of rule .303
GRRRRR!
[This message has been edited by Agaricus bisporus (edited 30 March 2001).]