Reading issue 7/2010 of the CAA's GASIL I noticed that they have instructed QinetiQ to conduct a survey of how UK Class G airspace is being used.
"As a first step, the ASI co-ordinators have commissioned an on-line survey..." which QinetiQ have placed onto one of the world's cheapest on-line survey tools called SurveyMonkey (undoubtedly to help save everyone involved money so that they can keep the cost of our license renewals down).
It would be nice to think that an obvious link would be placed somewhere prominent on the CAA or AirSpaceSafety websites, but I'm afraid you're required to type in
www.surveymonkey.com/s/G5Z9BNB. What then follows is a fairly complex survey that needed either hours trawling through your logbook or an electronic logbook in Excel to be able to filter out the figures requested.
All of this information is collected anonymously and many may think this is a good thing. However, with no log of who is supplying this data its value is worthless.
I'd like to think that the owner of this project in QinetiQ will be checking for patterns of responses from the same IP addresses, but that wouldn't stop me submitting rubbish data every time I visit a new "hotspot".
The bigger worry, of course, it that the project sponsor in the CAA believes the data because they spent £xxxK getting it from one of the UK's major corporates.
Finally we will see some new legislation/policies from the CAA, based on a survey that no-one could easily find, promoted in a publication aimed mainly at the fixed wing community, collecting anonymous data with no form of verification as to it authenticity.
However, without input from helicopter pilots our views/data will be ignored/missing. So go on, embrace the SurveyMonkey and put your data in.
If you're from the CAA and you're reading this, SHAME ON YOU! You know who all the licensed pilots are in the UK you know how to get hold of them. You could have conducted an anonymous postal survey that ensured that everyone had the chance to contribute.
To the QuinetQ survey manager. Did you go for the £19.95 / month option or did you push the boat out and go Unlimited for £200 / annum?