What is good for the Goose..........
Well, perhaps what is being unearthed is that pilot qualifications are being influenced as much by restrictive practice as it is safety. But that of course is not without precedent within the UK. Class A airspace is a rare beast within the UK but is established where 'heavy' traffic is intense. Legislation is often designed with the circumstances of the time in mind.
Not that many years ago when much current legislation was conceived a VOR installed in a C172 was a point of interest. Anything more and private pilots would oogle through the window for hours on end. Many transport aircraft such as the F27 and others had nothing more than dual VOR, ADF, DME and manual trim. Climb rates on others were poor when loaded to max and not much better than many private GA types in that condition. The old RADAR needed a very high specialist skill with a high degree of interpolation by experienced controllers. I've spent hours, some twenty years ago, sat next to RADAR controllers trying to see pointed out aircraft amongst cloud returns and most of the time never did. Restrictive practices were to an extent understandable.
Nowadays it is unusual for modern Watchman RADAR, at least, not to be available at most airports with precision approaches. All public transport aircraft must be equiped with TACAS. Light aircraft are equiped to be an envy of many commercial operations and will usually have Mode C and increasingly Mode S as a minimum. Most light aircraft however complex they may appear are well within the requirements for single pilot operation.
We do have to understand the difficulties that exist for controllers with too great a variation in performance of aircraft. A Heavy will reduce speed to 200-250kts below 10,000ft which is still much greater than a great many light singles that will impress at 150kts full chat. I was held at the hold at Glasgow some time back for over 30 minutes. This was because of the elapsed time we required to T/O after a landing heavy. The following heavies to land didn't need the spacing and continued to land and others taxied past us to T/O putting our departure continously back. The Tower controller was 1st class and continued to apologise for the delay. He didn't need to apologise for we understood but its an indication of the difficulties in mixing aircraft of a different class in a busy environment.
Not that many airports are that busy of course and that is true throughout Europe also. Aircraft performance can be a major restrictor but when the IMCr is not.