Any insurgents here?

[kevmusic]

I am constantly reading of how various bogeymen like the CAA (or the FAA across the pond), the BAA and any other kind of AA are out to get the GA pilot, and as such, are our natural foes. But I'm sure it can't be as black and white as all that. Are there shakers & movers in the CAA who have PPLs & enjoy pottering about the sky on Sunday afternoons? And are any of them lurking about in these forums and reading this very post?!

The things I read in Pilot, Flyer and elsewhere would have us believe that the CAA is nothing but a bunch of anonymous pen-pushing beaurocrats whose training and life focuses on treating GA as a irritating nuisance. A bit like house flies. The assumption is that there is next to no dialogue between the parties and that we are implacably on opposite sides of the fence.

But are any of you peeps out there in the CAA? Or the AEF? Or an airline operator? In short, is there some real understanding and perception going on?

Just curious. :ok:

Kev

[QDMQDMQDM]

Look, I went to a CAA flight safety evening recently at Eggesford and the guys there really had no idea how we fly and what we strip flyers do. None whatsoever. It was painful.

They would crush us out of existence in the interests of 'safety' and don't give a sh*t.

QDM

[IO540]

Unfortunately anybody who is familiar enough with internal CAA politics isn't going to post it here!

My take on it is this:

The CAA are supportive of GA activity. It is not in their interest at all to kill it.

Unfortunately the CAA has a long history and a lot of baggage, and they have lost their way.

One problem is that the CAA has too many old hands in it. Sure enough about half a dozen of their (what was, it was closed recently) GA dept do or did have PPLs but I think they are mainly old farts, rapidly approaching retirement, and this is where for example the various anti-GPS propaganda comes from. The safety evening presenter I met personally (a few years ago) is certainly in this category; he was well out of touch. I once read a list of who had a PPL there and what they were flying and it was all old stuff - no wonder they are against anything invented after WW2.

If every person in the CAA had a PPL/IR and owned and flew modern piston or turboprop aeroplanes, VFR and IFR and airways, all over Europe, we would have a fantastically good and effective regulator which would push and modernise GA all over. Instead we have a bunch of grey haired traditionalists, often ex-RAF navigators (and navigators tend to be people who failed to make the grade to actually fly something) who joined the CAA to safeguard their final salary based index linked civil servant pension and are counting the days to their retirement.

The people in the CAA who are on the ball are working on the airline / transport side of things - this is the vast majority of CAA work.

Things are changing though. EASA has taken over certification, but hasn't yet got a clue on a lot of it. It will soon take over licensing (FCL). The CAA will have nothing to do, other than prosecute pilots in British courts, and ground Thai 747s that are found landing at Heathrow with their engines falling off.

[potkettleblack]

I have some sympathy for the CAA in a lot of respects. It was our politicians afterall that told them that they had to make a profit unlike most other govt departments who merely spend all of their remaining budgets near the end of each financial year in order to secure another handout. Also I would hazard a guess that if you were to measure the time that they deal on GA matters compared with the airline stuff versus where their revenues come from then the GA stuff probably takes up the bulk. Spend a month on pprune and it never ceases to amaze me how little interest people take in searching for information by taking a gander in say LASORS. Most don't even know it exists. Compare this with your average airline that the CAA deals with. They will have a team of experienced professionals who largely do a lot of the CAA's work for them and send all the right bits and pieces electronically to get the tick in the boxes that they need.

Who knows where the answer lies with EASA. I guess it will cost more no doubt as these things always seem to for some strange reason. Or perhaps that is just down to the fact that the EU hasn't yet been able to get a set of books audited with an unqualified opinion and the cash must be going somewhere?

[IO540]

Every indication is that nobody knows what EASA is going to do.

On the one hand they appear positive on the certification front, having approved for example the Cirrus SR20/22. The CAA would have not approved a BRS chute over their dead body.

They are making encouraging noises over FCL and an accessible private IR in particular. But their proposals will never get past some members.

They might even deregulate the VFR side of GA, make it a bit like PFA. This would make a lot of sense. You can get PFA planes that run circles around the CofA spamcans. The CAA's insistence that anything capable of being on a CofA must be on a CofA is a blatent revenue protection racket.

Unfortunately, Euro politics is nothing if not political, so to get committee agreement on VFR de-reg they might well screw the IFR side of GA, which would be a shame since it would kill off GA activity for going places or for business. This in turn will make anybody who wants to do that go the FAA route (which they more or less do already) which will p*ss off the Eurocrats even more than it does already.....

[FlyingForFun]

IO540,If every person in the CAA had a PPL/IR and owned and flew modern piston or turboprop aeroplanes, VFR and IFR and airways, all over Europe, we would have a fantastically good and effective regulator which would push and modernise GA all overYou are probably correct... but then the band of modern GA enthusiasts we had in our hypothetical CAA would no doubt try to ban anything as "under-equipped" as a Cub, Tiger Moth or Chipmunk. In fact, now I think about it, the whole tail-dragger thing is very unsafe.... :\

What we really want is a good cross-section of GA represented in the CAA: some people who tour, as you suggest, others who fly classic aircraft from strips, ex-instructors, previous aerobatic champions, air-taxi pilots, and so on. To take the bunch of single-minded old farts that we currently have and replace them with a different bunch of single-minded old farts with a slightly different agenda won't really help anyone who has a different agenda to the new bunch of old farts. (Not that I'm suggesting you are an old fart, of course!)

FFF
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[IO540]

I agree about diversity. However I think a bunch of farts with decent flying budgets would do more for GA than a bunch of farts with no flying budgets, which is more or less what the difference is.

GA needs an injection of money first and foremost. There is a load of it about but it's all going elsewhere. All the people with small budgets can fly on the back of that. But they alone will never support GA. Not enough of them, not enough landing fees and fuel sales to support the airfields.

Whereas a plane which takes on 100 gallons and pays a £20 landing fee is very welcome in most "GA" places :O

The way European GA is going, it's quite possible that 20 years hence we will have nothing other than Cardiff, Bournemouth, Southend (etc) at one end, and farm strips at the other, with nothing in between. Ask anybody who runs an airfield.