It may be no consolation, but I am aware of some of the stuff going on behind the scenes here. The CAA are pretty inefficient at the best of times, but a 'perfect storm' has developed which makes them even worse than normal - if such a thing were possible. Under the new EASA rules, which no one fully understands (and may explain the numerous mistakes on people's licences), no Type Rating Instructor (TRI) or Type Rating Examiner (TRE) can be revalidated unless he has an EASA licence. Therefore many airlines have decided to apply en-masse for their TRIs/TREs to receive new EASA licences. In the case of easyJet, who I work for, that is the best part of 100 people - that is a lot of licences. I assume the same scene exists at Virgin, BA, Monarch, FlyBe etc and that makes for a massive spike in applications. To add to the misery, at the very time we needed all hands on deck, the CAA temporarily stopped accepting applications to get themselves in order at the time of the changeover. The end result is a massive backlog of applications and an apparent lack of overall direction to try and sort it. No consolation as I say, but even the CAA are recognising it is all a shambles. I just hope that someone, somewhere can get a grip on the situation fairly soon and even send out some sort of communication to everyone waiting. It does have a 'third world' feel about it sadly and rivals anything you would come across in Africa or similar.