Your Dudeness,
Totally and completely right; on most if not all of local meetings regarding the future of our operations; there is NO representatives of our industry; i am sitting on numerous of those, and ALL the time , i am the first GA representative they meet; all the others are airlines; tell what BA, AF, U2, or LH have to care about Kilo Apron in NCE or the turnaround time in FRA ?
Instead of this, when an entity is fighting to keep a kind of normal ops ( like in Cannes) by publishing a very simple guideline to follow; everyone from one airplane operators to EBAA is complaining about it; patronizing that this is rubbish, etc. BUT when asked to flow corrections and ideas in ( that matches regulations of course and other requests) nobody is doing anything ?
Illegal charter is EVERYWHERE; " partners " ; "friends" are flying with brown enveloppes floating around; the brokers are sucking out the little profit left, and the whole industry is suffering , and as a consequence, pilot's conditions are deteriorating.
I have 20 years to retirement, the previous 20 have been from outstanding to ok, I fear that the next half will not bring an high positive spin up.
Regulations:
We lost common sense , because lawyers are flying the planes; We are scrutinized by our ops in order to keep the auditors happy. We lost common sense in our industry, over regulating every single move, to a point where flying becomes so difficult that you see airplane being registered in countries never heard of ( sometimes with no airport); just to avoid the regulation burden.
Flying is still fun, less enjoyable sometimes, it start to become a job, where it was a passion. WE need to separate regulations from airlines ( like in the USof A), we need to work on something long term; but again, it won't be initiated by our employers, only us can do it...
dring dring... alarm clock... a dream again...