@ GlobalNav...
Agreed. The cost of maintaining Cat II and Cat III qualifications, both for crew training and equipment is apparently more than it's worth in the pt 91 world. It would seem that the G650 coming out of the factory as Cat I instead of Cat II is an acknowledgment of that, plus the accomplishments of EFVS and eventually, perhaps, potential of SVS to provide access to more airports in low visibility without the Cat II baggage.
Any corporation that can afford a $20M plus aircraft can afford to be a CAT II operator. The cost of training the crews to CAT II is negligible and the maintenance cost with modern digital avionics is also negligible.
In our operation here in Canada, both private and commercial, as per our COM and SOPs, we had to do an initial company CAT II course/lesson (on-line) followed by a small written exam. Then when in training at Bombardier for a recurrent, we had an initial CAT II slide presentation prior to our sim followed by a sim session with four CAT II approaches some with failures during the approach and one with a missed approach... Done!
Once the above is done, all that is required in our operation as per our COM and SOPs, is our annual recurrent training in which a CAT II approach is flown.
The difference between the commercial ops (704) and private ops (604) is that if you operate commercially to keep you CAT II validation a PPC/flight test is required annually versus in a private ops it is every two years.
So the only additional cost pilot wise is the initial course and sim training. Afterwards a CAT II approach is used for the precision approach portion required by TC (instead of a CAT I) in our regular recurrent sim training.
On the maintenance side, I'm told by our chief engineer that in our normal/regular maintenance programs that have been in effect for many years (this even prior to being CAT II certified) on both the Challenger 604 and our Globals cover the CAT II maintenance requirements... We do not have to do anything special to keep the aircrafts CAT II certified so no additional costs.