Glider pilots need to wake up and smell the coffee.
About 10 years ago, following the Dunblane shooting, Britain's recreational taget shooting community lost the right to own certain categories of gun.
If glider pilots do not adopt a more cooperative attitude, they could find themselves in the same boat and frankly few people in the community at large would shed many tears for them, since most people are more interested in their sun flights than protecting minority rights
I hardly thibnk this is an appropriate response. Unless of course some jetliner pilot is going to deliberately set out to sideswipe lots of other aircraft out of the sky.
It seem to me as if we have a situation whereby a governing body has already decided how they want to proceed, and have formulated their "options" accordingly. As the light aircraft people have stated, this consultation is badly flawed, does NOT meet government guidelines, is ill conceived and badly thought through with litle or no evidence to support its options and has not given anyone an opportunity to comment on a "do nothing" option.
All the evidence suggests that safety is improving all the time. Proxes are significantly down, I won't re-print the figures - read other posts. The CAA's own figures state that 15% of airspace infrigements involve aircraft without transponders. I would respectfully point out that in reality that means 85% of infringements are by aircraft WITH transponders. So the answer is simple, take out all the transponders and reduce the infringements (I'm kidding of course but I hope you can see the point- the figures just do not make the CAA's case that light aircraft (including gliders) represenrt any kind of threat to other air users,
The only conclusion many of us can come to is that the CAA has recently changed it's name to "Commercial Aviation Authority" and no longer has the best interests of the rest of civil aviation at heart