Have the CAA now stopped accepting applications to set up registered facilities? and gone over to ATO.
No. The EASA Implementing Rules do not come into force until 8 April 2012 and the UK CAA have declared a 3 year transition period to allow Registered Facilities to become fully compliant. Consequently, there is no obligation on a current RF to become an ATO until 8 April 2015. The CAA have recently had to require all current Registered Facilities to re-register (at a cost of £100 per year) because they failed to keep track of how many facilities were registered.
Does anyone know what the differences are in both set up and running costs and any extra administration thats involved.
Not precisely. The intended requirements have, until now, been detailed in Part-OR but this has not yet completed the Comment/Response process and so nothing is certain. In any case, EASA has now decided to do away with Part-OR and to include its ATO-related provisions in Part-FCL, which
has completed CRD and is currently undergoing the comitology process.
On the basis of the Rules already published in Part-OR, it is likely that an ATO, even if only offering the PPL and LAPL, will have to produce (and obtain approval of) an Operations Manual, a Training Manual and a Safety Management and Quality System as well as complying with formal staff training requirements. Since the approval process will require CAA involvement, there willl clearly be a fee imposed over and above the costs of initially meeting the requirements and thereafter maintaining compliance.
God knows why we have to register as an RTF, FTO and TRTO
Because the UK CAA seems incapable of reading and understanding the requirements. Registration is required solely for organisations conducting
only PPL training and nothing precludes an FTO from offering type rating training without also being a TRTO.
In one of the above mentioned EASA documents.... it mentions the requirment for aerodromes for trainign and one point mentions being a controlled airfield!
Your link leads to the Certification Standards for FSTDs, which is hardly relevant. The proposed rules for airfields to be used for flight training are, for the moment, detailed in Part-OR. The relevant hard law (OR.ATO.140) does not mention controlled airfields at all; it simply requires that an ATO shall use aerodromes or operating sites that have the appropriate facilities. An air traffic control service is, however, mentioned in the associated AMC, which currently reads
"....an air traffic service except for uncontrolled airfields or operating sites where the training requirements may be satisfied safely by another acceptable means of air-to-ground communication" Interpretation of this is left to the 'competent' authority, as is the option to accept an alternative acceptable means of compliance, potentially removing the requirement for any form of air-to-ground communication.
Bear in mind also that, under EU law, an alternative AMC accepted by
any competent authority becomes automatically acceptable in
all member states (i.e. if an alternative AMC that does not include any requirement for air-to-ground communication is accepted by, say, the Bulgarian authority, the UK must accept it as well)