I note that the President of European Air Sports has now stated (my bold text for emphasis):
We have a published guiding principle which our members endorsed some years ago with the advent of EASA, which is 'The guiding principle for the transfer of governance from national authorities to a European authority should be: “what is permitted and conducted safely today in individual countries should continue to be permitted under the new regime." '
I guess that guiding principle covers the point quite well as regards the IMCr. The stance we have taken is that we support the retention of the IMCr in the UK, and if it is possible to negotiate its wider acceptance beyond UK shores we shall do so. Equally however we have been active over several years in Europe in pressing for a more accessible IR compared to the present JAA IR. Hopefully that will be one of the final outcomes of the work that has been going on this last year.
This is a most welcome statement. EAS claims to represent around 320000 pilots and owners, of whom the PPL/IR Europe group are only 0.125%. One must thus query why the EAS delegate on FCL.008 does not appear to have presented his own organisation's clear policy in repsect of the IMC rating.
Since AOPA (UK) knew that EAS supported the continuance of the UK IMC rating, it was hardly unreasonable for AOPA to expect that this EAS policy would be presented at FCL.008 by the EAS delegate.
This all supports the point I made to Eric Sivel last week; clearly the FCL.008 group did
not represent stakeholder opinion, hence the data EASA now has from them is fundamentally flawed and should be firmly rejected.