DOCS for flying
 

Does anyone know why a lot of the flight stores charge ludicrous amounts for CAA and ICAO documents when you can download them for nothing? Just learning radio at the moment and one shop wanted £18 for cap 413 but downloaded and printed it for nothing at work.:ok:

Been happening for a long time. Don't see what the problem is. What if you can't print out at work and so on......

Well I'm fairly new to the world of aviation,just found it a bit strange. Is there any difference between the version they sell and the one you can download?

I am not sure to be totally honest, just if you do get it printed from other places they tend to come bound and a lot neater and that. Worth paying for if your not to bothered about money (like most of us on here) :p

The printed versions used to come in a ring binder, not sure if they still do.

When you work out the total cost of printing a 200 page document (or whatever) on an inkjet printer when you haven't nicked the paper from work, the cost difference is less than you might think.

I don't think the CAA had a web site when I bought my copy of CAP 413!

NATS used to charge £300+ for a subscription to the UKAIP and £20 or so for the AICs. They always maintained that this was the cost of distributing the bi-monthly updates etc. When CD-ROM technology came along they offered the option of having it on disc for around £70 PA. When they started their website they offered it at no cost to end users.

It must cost hundreds of thousands a year to keep the regular updates going. Does this come out of en-route nav charges (which most aviatiors don't pay) or do the CAA subsidise NATS to produce this as a part of our ICAO obligation (in which case, I guess we do pay through the money that the CAA extract from GA).

By the way, I know the history of how NATS wound up looking after the UKAIP, AICs etc but isn't it about time that our public/private financed Air Traffic provider gave this task back where it belongs, to the CAA? What about NOTAM, should this be a CAA task as well? At least the CAA's website works better than NATS, the latter's a nightmare in my view!

Personally, I keep all the key CAA and NATS documents as .pdf in folders on my PC, so that I can access them any time I like. I look at hte relevant websites every now and again, just to make sure I've got the up-to-date version.

Cheers,
TheOddOne

If I understand the history correctly, the CAA views itself as the generator of the content of these documents which are rules or guidance or other useful stuff. In the olden days the only way to get this information out to the masses was to print it. The price of the documents was only to cover the costs of printing and distribution (and profit for the company that did it) - it's just that the companies that did the printing and distribution were not very efficient. When the internet became available this offered another way to distribute the information at much lower cost - both to the CAA and to 'customers'/users. There are still companies that will sell printed copies of the documents and the price should reflect little more than the cost of production if that's what you want - the problem is that fewer people buy commercially printed versions and so the unit costs go up.

There is another advantage to having the documents available on-line in that you can be sure it is the up to date, definitive version rather than a copy of last year's issue of CAP 413, or whatever, that the flying club or shop is trying to clear before they buy any copies of the latest edition.

As for the AIS stuff that TheOddOne mentions, the reason that NATS operates large parts of the AIS is because it is an obligation in the licence granted to NATS by the Government when the company was split from the CAA. It's not uncommon for AIS to be provided under contract although he's quite right that the AIS website is not the most user-friendly or functional one around!