Extraordinary, isn't it? The CAA will prosecute you viciously for some minor technical infringement that depends on lawyers pettifogging over the most esoteric of definitions, the Aviation Law ATPL paper is largely based on pedantic comprehension of the most convoluted punctuation, double negatives, multiple subordinate clauses and definitions perhaps derived from what was
not written in the rule, yet the CAA themselves collude in blatant logbook fraud in direct contravention of an unmistakably clearly written rule, additionally ensuring that the poor FOs are shortchanged on airmanship training and experience.
Compliance? What a joke!
For the benefit of our European colleagues who are rightly astonished at all this, know that the FO booking PICUS time on the UK register does not have to tell the Captain that he is doing it (they never do in fact) nor even request a signature - he just writes it in his logbook! Thus, even if the Captain
has had to intervene or override him for safety reasons there is no way for this to affect the recording of a successful PICUS sector! Neither does the FO
ever demonstrate his Captaincy on a non handling sector.
Bizarre or what?
ONLY with approved Captains and with an Approved Airline PICUS programme, and no further PICUS than required for ATPL issue.
That is most certainly not the case with UK CAA. If the orange outfit described by meikleleour has an "approved PICUS Training Programme" none of the Captains know anything about it - what they do have is effectively an exemption from the CAA to ignore the rule regarding the proper conduct of PICUS. A bit like an airline somewhere west of wales whose Flt Ops Director told me, without hint of irony, "We do not apply that paragraph in our Operations Manual".
It's also not my experience that this has been going on "since time immemorial"; when I was in the FO's seat needing P1 hours (in the mid - late '80s) the P1u/s protocol was rigidly applied and Flight Crew Licensing took great interest in seeing that you hadn't logged above your quota, and an equal interest in seeing the Captain's signatures were present and licence numbers legible.