The wording of the bid title is “8.33kHz Radio Equipage for UK GA Fleet”, so I presume the funding will be for any non-CAT aircraft operator.
The UK register has about 20,000 currently registered aircraft, so that averages about 200 Euro per aircraft if divided between them all.
If it was just for the 2000 registered gliders then it would be 2000 Euros each
There have been posts on the BGA and LAA websites – example – citing the above PDF and suggesting it is applicable to the whole UK GA fleet.
It however appears that nobody knows how to apply for it…
FWIW, in my business I have seen countless EU grant schemes. One is usually contacted by an “arranger” who takes a commission of some 25% if you get it. Astonishingly, this is not illegal. But the conditions are always rigged that the only way to meet the requirements for the grant is to be virtually bankrupt (basically you have to demonstrate that you cannot fund it yourself) but if you are virtually bankrupt you won’t be able to use it anyway… The academic research community has a highly polished machine for applying for EU grants, but the money takes 2-3 years to arrive and with last Friday’s OUT vote all the collaborative projects (which the EU has funded preferentially) are being pulled by their EU-based partners.
Details here:
http://www.caa.co.uk/News/EU-funding-on-the-way-for-UK-GA,-Grant-made-available-for-8-33-kHz-radio-equipage/
Apparently they will pay up to 20% of the upgrade.
Anyway this can be extended to other countries? My club’s c172 really needs a new radio!
Thanks for your generosity ;-)
I don’t think this headline is anywhere near the full story.
I bet no normal owner-pilot can get this money in reality.
I have been up this road before in my business. Most EU grants (or any govt grants for that matter) are stitched up so tightly in application procedures that only a masochist can get them. This is why e.g. UK academia (as one big example) is a big loser on Brexit – they have a huge well lubricated EU grant application machine, itself organised and heavily funded (from, ahem, the grants) to draw up the complicated applications (which are usually, for PC reasons, structured as joint applications with mainland EU universities) and to push them for the 2-3 years it takes for the money to arrive. No individual or business can get this money through any normal procedure. They will lose the will to live…
Also the €4.3M is hard to understand. The UK has about 20k GA planes (CAA number, IIRC). How much is 8.33? By the time an avionics shop has been in there and sorted out the decades’ old mess of previous wiring and bodges (bodged audio panel wiring is common) you are looking at several k. So €4.3M is of the order of 1/10 to 1/20 of the cost to UK GA of this nutty-as-fruitcake 8.33 spectacle… Even the 20% funding mentioned is too small.
Also the UK has not left the EU and it will be an EU member until it leaves. There is no legal basis for pulling the plug on existing EU obligations. Because the UK is an EU member, it is still paying the € few hundred M per week into the EU. So there is no basis for withdrawing privileges coming the other way. Had the UK stopped its EU funding, there would be an argument to stop all the stuff coming back, but it has not done that. Only a referendum took place. (The above mentioned joint EU grant applications got trashed by mainland application partners the day after the Brexit vote because of the 2-3 year pipeline).
It was the EU that forced this change to 8.33 spacing (recently imposing an unnecessary £2200 cost to me which I could have done without), so it’s right the EU should bear the cost whether the UK is remaining or not.
Actually it was the national-driven bitching about frequency and sector allocation, that led to the need of 8,33 spacing. If those nationalist administrations were really to comply to basic European ideas and regulations, we wouldn’t have the problem and could spend the money on more sensible things like inflight weather or TIS. To blame this on the EU is a shortcut through the facts.
Agree totally; 8.33 is a complete waste of time.
Also I don’t understand the 20% funding. It’s like saying to someone “we will chop off your leg but to make it more acceptable we will chop off just 20% of it”.
The EU seems to be able to get through all sorts of other things, like the EASA regulations on flight crew licensing, SERA et al. – so why were they unable to push through a centralised system of frequency allocation, which would seem like a relatively straightforward task when compared with everything that had to be done to make EASA happen?
If I were living in the UK, I would have voted remain incidentally, generally speaking I’m a Europhile. However, I fully understand why people wanted to leave because you get a mess like this: Brussels seems to be able to push through things that have no business being centralised and fail to push through things that would be very beneficial to be centralised. The EU really is its own worst enemy.
