B Sousa:
One of the fundamental problems here in the UK - and one that is estimated to increase the cost of a commercial helicopter course by almost 50 per cent - is CAA charges.
In the late 1980s we had a free-wheelin' free-market government that mandated that the Civil Aviation Authority (and a large number of other government arms) recovered their entire running costs from the industries they "served". In aviation, of course, that's a very big bureaucracy and a very small customer base.
Everything you take for granted from the FAA has to be paid for in full by the user in the UK. To get a star annual on my R22 signed off by the CAA (and all they do is stamp the document, they don't even look at the engineering work - it literally takes 20 seconds) recently cost me £950 or about $1400. A friend with an AS350 paid almost $5,000 for the same service.
Our biggest training organisation, Cabair, pays about half a million pounds a year in fees to the CAA. Acting as it does as an unpaid collection agent for the government, it also takes the flak for the charges. And don't even start me off about the Public Transport Category Certificate of Airworthiness, a hugely expensive piece of bureaucratic nonsense which cripples UK owners, especially those with low-utilisation aircraft, and only the United Kingdom has to put up with. The rest of the world seems to manage without it.
The upshot is that an R22 costs an obscene amount of money to put into the air in the UK, examination fees (non-existent or very low in most countries) are usurious, and any time the CAA wants more money, they just mandate another requirement and we have to pay.