Pirate
20th May 2001, 01:14
Inkjet,
There's quite an interesting story about why your licence no longer has a picture. Years ago, up to the 1980s the UK professional licences had a passport function, effectively allowing UK citizens back into Blighty without a separate passport. Quite a useful function in those pre-EU days. One day, the CAA Licensing department received a letter from a pilot saying that he was having a sex change operation and so could his licence be re-issued, reflecting new name and gender. CAA was fairly relaxed about this but referred the case to the Home Office, concerning the passport element. Home Office said not possible for various legal reasons relating to gender change. So the long and short of it was CAA decided to ditch the passport function to avoid this and other possible future conflicts with legislature. This coincided with computerisation of FCL so it was convenient to ditch the photo. Of course, with today's technology, a digital image could be inserted but I shouldn't think it,s worth the bother.
There's quite an interesting story about why your licence no longer has a picture. Years ago, up to the 1980s the UK professional licences had a passport function, effectively allowing UK citizens back into Blighty without a separate passport. Quite a useful function in those pre-EU days. One day, the CAA Licensing department received a letter from a pilot saying that he was having a sex change operation and so could his licence be re-issued, reflecting new name and gender. CAA was fairly relaxed about this but referred the case to the Home Office, concerning the passport element. Home Office said not possible for various legal reasons relating to gender change. So the long and short of it was CAA decided to ditch the passport function to avoid this and other possible future conflicts with legislature. This coincided with computerisation of FCL so it was convenient to ditch the photo. Of course, with today's technology, a digital image could be inserted but I shouldn't think it,s worth the bother.