Legal action against the CAA and examiner

[rmcb]

Just from the principle of failure of two sections - as I interpret it the OP was allowed to fly the entire test. The moment he/she left the circuit for the next section (presumably the Nav.) he/she should have been failed there and then and then flown back incurring minimal cost.

If your altimeter setting skills are as careful and accurate as your spelling and grammar

Unvbelieveable

Sueing

Pot, kettle and black springs to mind - toxic mushroom...

Defamation of character is a little strong, but the examiner should debrief properly - even if it is a fail - and is therefore wanting in the professionalism department so espoused by Big Grecian. I wish I could be that perfect.

Personally I am amazed the OP got through the whole test without having to change his/her altimeter at all with various agency contact. This suggests the examiner was eyeing a second altimeter, not required for the VFR CPL test. Rash not to use both, I will grant you, but not necessary.

[cavortingcheetah]

But then, if you wanted to, how could you extricate yourself from the alligator pond into which your pride, for want of anything more or less descriptive, has landed you? The idea that you might wish extrication might be a far fetched one but it's no more improbable than the thought that says the examiner is reading about himself on wrinkled plum's pages and formulating his own defamation or libel suit against you for the words you've already written?
It'll probably take one of those lawyer's letters to the CAA and to the examiner saying that, without admitting any prejudice, you are withdrawing your case. Lawyers are good at saving face for their clients. Your legal mouthpiece could take the time to thank all and sundry for the concession of a retest and perhaps acknowledge that your original legal adviser was not in possession of all the facts. A pragmatic solution might just be possible if the other parties wished to let the matter drop.

[Mariner9]

The moment he/she left the circuit for the next section (presumably the Nav.) he/she should have been failed there and then and then flown back incurring minimal cost.

Why? If I had been failed after 5 minutes in such circumstances and asked to fly back I would not have been happy. Time spent in an aircraft is seldom wasted - the experience gained in the remaining sections would likely have contributed positively to the OP's subsequent sucessful test. It would also have added a couple of hours TT towards his ATPL issue - hours he would have to fly in any event (and thus his additional costs if sucessful in Court would seem to me to be limited to 1 extra landing fee, perhaps £20?)

[Wirbelsturm]

How do you get parallax when setting a number anyway????

1023 or 1024?? Looks like a digit to me!!!

[rmcb]

OK, Mariner9, I understand your viewpoint but I believe cost should be kept to an absolute minimum at all cost.

If the examiner is taking the view this is a failure, the moment the second phase of the test is started and the candidate has failed to recognise his/her egregiousness, he/she should be told the test is failed and given the option to fart around with a SPIC flight or put money saved towards another test.

Whether the purists like it or not, I believe that the game is to get the ticket and carry on with the learning in a more relaxed environment. This does not mean reducing your own very high standards but if you live in 'perfect world' nobody would ever pass the event! We would all fall foul of self criticism irrespective of the examiner's expert witness.

[Bealzebub]

A defamation of character claim has a unique process when a claim occurs. The claim is brought in the High Court and is heard by a jury as well as a judge.

Defamation of character happens when someone says, or writes, something untrue about you (or your business or product) which is damaging to your reputation (or that of your business).

A defamation of character lawsuit will only be successful if the information published is untrue in some respect, or exaggerated, or reported in an intentionally misleading way.

How must the statement be made?
The statement must be communicated to a person other than the person whose reputation is being damaged.

I am curious as to how you were defamed?

My sister is a Barrister, so I don't have to worry about legal fees so i think it is worth perusing.

Why? Is your sister proposing to pay them for you? A Barrister is usually appointed by the solicitor who advises you. You are then the Barristers lay client. Libel claims through the High court are a "big ticket" item, and usually avoided if at all possible. I am sure your sister, and certainly a solicitor would have advised you of that.

If you appealed the conduct of your test and were offered a "free re-test," but no reversal or setting aside of the original test decision, it would appear you accepted the offer, rather than refusing it and then persisting with your claim?

Sorry, but this all sounds a little screwy. As a first post, you are commenting on a supposedly pending high court case. Further you are naming individuals (who don't seem to be directly involved) from behind your own cloak of anonymity.

To be honest it was not just the point that me failed me over a little thing like the QNH.

I did my IR with K**** B****, and if I had done my CPL with him and he had failed me chances are I would have just taken it on the chin, and let the whole thing drop, because he explains everything in great details, and his de-briefs are great and he comes across as a just an all round nice person.

There would seem to be a monumental chasm between somebody being an "all round nice person," and them defaming you? Is there a chunk of your story missing?

[Martin1234]

One reason to continue the test could have been that it might not have been a fail on that ground if the examinee would have corrected the error by changing the altimeter setting before the exam came to an end.

Perhaps it is taken to small claims court and you don't have to pay much if you loose?

I wonder what your purpose is of bringing the CAA and the examiner to court? Have you tried to get compensation from the CAA for the loss of revenue and aircraft hire for the second test? Claiming compensation for defamation of character and suing the examiner seem a little "far out". As you probably won't get more compensation by going after the examiner as well it seems like you just want to use the court system to retaliate.

Please keep in mind that the purpose of the exam is to determine if the examinee meets certain standards for the issue of in this case a CPL licence. That's it. The CAA didn't ask employers to check if someone passed the first time or not. It's not a pre-employment test, therefore it doesn't matter if you passed the first time or not other than that it might cost you time and money to retake the test.

Have you considered dropping the claim of defamation of character and letting the lawsuit against the examiner on hold until you have tried the case against the CAA? I don't see any reason to go after the examiner when you can go after his employer other than for retaliation.

I personally wouldn't have initiated a lawsuit in this case but it does sound sensible that you claimed the CAA for the compensation of the aircraft hire and loss of income to retake the exam - if - the outcome is that the exam wasn't conducted properly (because the examiner couldn't have determined the altimeter setting used by 1 mb or that 1 mb is an acceptable error on a VFR CPL test). But defamation of character, how do you substantiate that one?

[Cobalt]

I'd just reconsider, and stop this - it'll only cost time and money.

I think you got a fair deal from the CAA. You did get a free retest. If you did get your result "converted" to a partial pass, which is the best you could hope for considering there were other issues in the test, you would have to pay half the test fee for the re-test, which is not miles off the cost of the aircraft for the first test. Also, you did get some flight experience, so you could consider yourself the winner.

As some here wrote - I wouldn't know, not hiring pilots for a living - noone will care, there is just one more dual entry in your logbook amongst many.

[wingreencard]

just pick up your cpl, and foget about this 1" difference.
my God, when you will send thousand of cv and noone will answer to you because there is no job, you will forget about this unsignificant adventure with the CAA.

you goal now will be how to find money to renew your CPL, how to maintain current the IR, and how to deal with your mom and dad who treat you of a little nasty parasit everyday because you don't have a job or you live on a girlfriend or society' money.

grow up! get a normal job, and start to make real money! you are a just a bunch of unemployed troublemakers! all of you!

[Muddy Boots]

Mariner 9,

In the CAA link you posted earlier: Guidence of Applicants taking the CPL Skills Test (Aeroplanes).

You suggest we should read it, can I suggest you do so too?

There is a line:

3.5.3 The Examiner may stop the test at any stage if he considers that the applicant's demonstration of skill and/or knowledge requires a complete retest.

So, why are you so down on the poster about expressing he'd like to have been given a chance to halt the test and save some money. Especially as the examiner had clearly made his mind up going into section 2 with the altimeter setting still incorrect, that this was going to be a fail.


It is in the document you refer us to!


Please bear in mind, we have to pay an awful lot of money out of our own pockets to enable us to enter a career with no guarantee of getting a job.


Most examiners have had their career and are examining in their twilight flying years. Chances are they are ex RAF and have had their flying paid for, which isn't an option even if we wanted to sign up, ask all the lads who had their courses cancelled on them during the Strategic Defense Review. Even if they aren't ex military, they would have come up in a different era and have no idea of the sacrifices we have to go through with soaring fuel costs, etc.

[GS-Alpha]

Let us consider for a moment that the original poster is 100% in the right, and can win this case. What is it actually going to achieve? What is the big picture here? Does he want to become a commercial airline pilot, or does he want to win this little point and make his stand?

Personally I do not think it is worth cutting off your nose to spite your face. As other responses have already suggested, the flying world is a very small world. You could be seriously harming your career over what is, in the grand scheme of things, a highly trivial issue. If 'taking this one on the chin' is the only sacrifice you have to make in order to achieve your career aspirations, you'll be a far luckier man than most!

Good luck whatever you choose.

[frontlefthamster]

Sadly, the OP shows a truly monumental immaturity and lack of judgement.

This is becoming a genuine concern for me and others; only recently I was chatting with some visitors from a couple of major European airlines about our impressions of freshly-qualified commercial pilots from some of the big schools. We all agreed that there are some serious problems with people, to put it in Top Gun terms, whose mouths are writing cheques their bodies can't cash. They show some worrying behaviours associated with over-confidence and a lack of willingness to accept and deal with their mistakes. These are not welcome qualities in the flight deck.

One school at least has taken action to try to address this failing, partly as a result of unfavourable feedback from customer airlines.

The OP's very best course of action is to learn from this enormous mistake, delete his first post (which will delete the thread), and hope this matter is forgotten and no-one later puts two and two together. As others have pointed out, this could turn out to have been a career-shaping move should the dice roll the wrong way for him later in life...

[talkpedlar]

Thankfully..

..there are several thousand candidates out there with an fATPL and 250ish hours... and quite a number of them don't have a seriously bad attitude, a worrying level of arrogance, gross immaturity, questionable reasoning ability or lamentable literacy skills. It is unlikely that many of them would be proud to boast their bar-brawling inclinations too.

My own guess is that here we may have a spoiled only-child under mounting parental pressure to secure an airline job and start repaying that huge debt.

With respect, my own faith in our profession's selection and recruitment practices mean that this will most likely not happen and I'd wager a month's duty-pay that this fellow has a long history of ruffling feathers.

I'm out of this thread now.... quite the most disturbing issue for a long time.

[Genghis the Engineer]

we may have a spoiled only-child

With a sister.....

G

(Agreeing with the rest of what you said)

[Mariner9]

There is a line:

3.5.3 The Examiner may stop the test at any stage if he considers that the applicant's demonstration of skill and/or knowledge requires a complete retest.

So, why are you so down on the poster about expressing he'd like to have been given a chance to halt the test and save some money. Especially as the examiner had clearly made his mind up going into section 2 with the altimeter setting still incorrect, that this was going to be a fail.

The quote is correct Muddy Boots, but with respect I think your interpretation of it is incorrect. In my view, that caveat is there to allow the examiner to abandon a test in which the candidate is obviously a complete numpty - the OP says the rest of his flying was "excellent" so he was not a complete numpty in flying terms. If the OP is going to rely on 3.5.3in his Court action, he might have trouble convincing the Court that the word may in the referenced sentence actually means should or will

The published document also states that an important remit of the test is to assess if any recommended or mandatory further training is required in any aspect of the test prior to the resit. How could the examiner do this if only the 1st 2 parts of the test were flown? In my view, it would be highly unfair to the candidate if 1 or more parts of the test were omitted due to an earlier fail, and the candidate subsequently failed on these omitted sections in a resit.

It appears to me (and hopefully, to the OP's advising solicitors) is that in order to succeed in his Court action, the OP is first going to have to convince the Court that the CAA's standard test procedure (available to the candidate in writing) is unfair in that they assess the whole test profile rather than abandoning the test as soon as a candidate has failed. In my view, this will be a difficult hurdle to overcome given the stated further training assesment remit of the test.

Furthermore, when I did my IR (I've not done the CPL but presume its the same), the CAA examiner told me clearly in the briefing that he would not discuss any of the test sections during the flight. If that was the case for the OP, then he has accepted a verbal contract. That is yet another aspect that may present severe difficulties to him in Court!

Finally, I say again, what has this actually cost the OP in monetary terms? The 2 hours flying in the original test would have been required anyway to get him up to 1500 TT, so no cost incurred there. The CAA (very fairly in my view) gave him a free retest, so no cost incurred there either.

[Genghis the Engineer]

Furthermore, when I did my IR (I've not done the CPL but presume its the same), the CAA examiner told me clearly in the briefing that he would not discuss any of the test sections during the flight. If that was the case for the OP, then he has accepted a verbal contract. That is yet another aspect that may present severe difficulties to him in Court!

Whilst I'm lucky enough to have only done the one CPL skill test, that's my recollection also.

And it's important. I recall in mine becoming slightly uncertain of position because of restrictions put on me by the examiner. I dealt with it, still was uncertain, dealt with it again, and finally worked out exactly where I was and continued to a successful diversion.

The point being that I'd made a mistake, but then recognised it, dealt with it, and got the flight back on track. Had the examiner commented upon or intervened when I initially made my mistake, or even when I got my first attempt to rectify that wrong, I'd have failed the skill test. Because he sat back and watched me, he was also giving me the time and ability to identify and fully rectify my error. Which I'm very glad to say I did, and he considered that to eventually be satisfactory performance.

What appears to me to have been the real issue in the OPs flying was not the incorrect subscale setting - we've all done that from time to time, and many of us have probably done it under test as well. The issue was almost certainly that the OP failed to pick it up and deal with the error in a timely manner, and all the examiner needs to do is say that in court - and the case is over, with the OP out of pocket and a character severely dented by the perception - perhaps accurately - that he showed poor flying, poor monitoring of the flight and inability to correct his own errors, and most damningly of all, an inability to accept and use the corrective opinions of a more experienced pilot.

This last of course is what will render him unemployable, and is the reason why his ONLY sensible course of action is to withdraw his legal action, and write a grovelling letter of apology to the CAA for the misjudgment and wasting of their time. If he's lucky, he then won't end up with a massive bill for the legal fees they've run up already.

G

[truckflyer]

Just a little update on the CPL skills test, which I assume has not changed that much recently.

The test starts with the Navigation, than diversion, after this it is either circuits or general handling, depending on what is convenient with regards to the test area.

The OP does not mention what really happen during his test, as I would assume he would, or should have done a FREDA check approx. every 15 minutes, and actually updating, cross checking the altimeters.

It is correct as last poster said, the examiner, does say that he will not talk, unless spoken to. It is possible that the examiner was waiting to see if the student would notice his error, and it possible if the flight was otherwise flawless, that he was considering to partial the student at one stage.

However at what stage would you stop the skills test based on the QNH being set wrong?
During the diversion? General handling? Circuits? During the circuits he would have been in touch with ATC, and got a QNH. What QNH did the OP write on his notepad during contact with ATC?

There are many details that the OP has not written about, to defend himself, also the OP does not explain what kind of aircraft/altimeter he used on the skills test.

Have flown Warrior, Arrow, Seneca, C172, there is no way there would be any parallax error between 1023 and 1024, seriously they not sitting in 737 or A320 cockpit! Most SEP and MEP, are pretty tight/narrow.

I recall during my skill tests, that these issues was not only checked and cross checked, but also double and trippel checked, and SPOKEN out loud for the examiner to hear what I was doing.

I also believe in the brief, the examiner tells you that you should speak out LOUD what you are doing, so that the examiner actually knows and understands what you have done.

No use of doing a FREDA check, or HASELL check inside your own mind, without telling the examiner what you are doing!

I admit I am a novice in this area, but I do agree with a majority of the posters, legal action can not be the correct way.

The CAA have an appeal process on these cases, and I can for the life of me not understand why the OP have not followed this path.

And as somebody else mentioned, probably the terms and conditions was accepted when he accepted the re-test for free. The CAA might have chosen to make a compromise and give the student the benefit of the doubt, however with legal action, he has taken it to a complete different level.

My personal experience with the CAA, is that they are reasonable if you get into a dialogue with them. Also taking action against the examiner, I honestly find distasteful in this case.

As some say, the aviation world is not that big!

I recall my CPL skills test, I did a bummer, I was asked to do the fire drill engine out, fine started all good, I had lined up perfect for the field, and suddenly recalled I had only done engine out drill, I told the examiner I had screwed up, as I had not done the part for the fire drill, examiner was happy, told me to climb up and do the whole exercise again!

However the rest of the flight had been flawless. My experience with the examiners, are that they are very reasonable, at lest the examiners I had, and my friends had, we all had some minor niggles during our tests, but they did not fail us for those things.

Not discovering his mistakes during constant checks, or maybe he forget to do the constant checks, that would have made him aware of the error, probably made it wander from pass to partial or in the end a full fail.

CAA gave you a free retest, is not an admission of guilt! (Specially if the words "without prejudice" was written in the letter from the CAA)

I once heard of a story once, where a student managed to land with the gear up, examiner passed his CPL, for this later to be revoked by the CAA and the examiner investigated, student had to do another CPL skills test!

[Piltdown Man]

I do hope the CAA fight this. Then the name of this spoilt, denialist will be public. Then win or lose, the idiot loses.

[Cactus99]

Parallax error on an altimeter?!! Give me a break.

If that is your excuse, then you obviously don't have much of a professional career ahead of you my friend. The examiner wasn't born yesterday, I guarantee you he will have known exactly what was set on the altimeters. It was the wrong QNH, that is a fail. Deal with it.

A little bit worrying that a few people are saying it's ok, it was only 1 mb. Where do you draw the line here, 3/4 mb's? 10 feet below minima, it's only 10 feet or maybe 20 feet, it's okay

You are being tested for a professional licence, there should be no error on altimeter settings, and if mis-set, should be picked up timeously which clearly is not the case here.

TP offers sound advice which, if I were you, take heed and get this crazy notion out of your head.

Playing silly games trying to get one over on the CAA will only backfire and bite you on the proverbial.

[redED]

i will never back down from a fight whether it is a fight in the pub

What a charming chap. I can see your sister having to defend you a lot more in the future!