KEST - The challenge is one you should be setting Andrew Haines not the other way around.
In the email exchange you copy it says:-
I took personal responsibility for challenging the team with relation to some of the air display charges. But we face a hard fact that our charges for air displays have not covered their costs for many years and in the post Shoreham environment our costs have gone up considerably. So the gap is getting bigger and we cannot lawfully just elect other elements of aviation to cover these costs however attractive that might seem to those directly affected.
That waffle doesn't tell you anything. By far the biggest burden post Shoreham is not increased regulation but a focus that the task is undertaken properly. Over a year ago the CAA suddenly saw a need for an additional 4 full time employees to deal with airworthiness - not through huge change in regulation but a realisation that there is need to gain appropriate resource.
We don't have Haines funding model but what you can quite rightly argue is that in years past people have been paying for something that hasn't been done properly, and if you relate that to Shoreham it leads you to take one road which gives a very unpalatable conclusion.
He also doesn't give you any colour upon the years when cashflows exceeded expectation and where or how those additional funds were invested. I might note that post-Shoreham CAA accounts show that his performance related bonus was showing a healthy positive balance.
Frankly the situation is very poor and one wonders if Andrew Haines is bold enough to attend the BADA meeting next week and make the same challenge. I suspect he will not be.
Ultimately when he talks of the legal challenges to cross funding then actually as an executive of the CAA and a near £500k compensation he might see it as his "personal responsibility" to ensure his organisation is resourced adequately before the deaths of 11 people and subsequent 400+ page AAIB report tells him it isn't. Of course actually had he been listening perhaps it would have been because I think we all struggle to find significant numbers with anything particularly good to say about the CAA across the board.
One might note that even in these times of enhanced focus and attention from the CAA one huge theme post the 2016 display season was the timeliness of the paperwork and the mechanics of why display areas were what they were because very often they didn't seem to be entirely understandable with the unintended consequence to human performance as a result - I suspect Andrew Haines is not the man to fully understand that conversation....