Am I alone in thinking this is all arse about face?
I happen to have a copy of CAP701 on my desk, this shows the certified light aircraft fatal accident rate at a pretty constant 1 per 70,000 hours, and the microlight fatal accident rate at 1 per 50,000 hours and improving. Not a huge difference.
Shouldn't the GA chappies be rather looking at the microlight chappies working practice and trying to adopt their approaches which make things cheaper without degrading safety, rather than what does rather smack of "we have to put up with these expensive rules, why shouldn't they".
Quick back-of-envelope sum. The UK has about 5000 microlight pilots and about 150 microlight instructors, who each fly I think around 400 instructional hours per year. The change would need to add about 16 flying hours - or about 2 average weeks onto the load of each instructor. Another way to look at it - at about £50/hr thats a cost to the BMAA's membership of about £125,000 per year. You start to see where BMAA's CEO is coming from.
Also looking at the BMAA's hiring rules on their website
(here) it includes a mandatory checkout with an instructor for anybody hiring. So what would a BFR add to that?
P