Not too worry Grant Shapps will sort it all out………
Timothy wrote:
Biggin Hill is going to be next to apply.
Agreed. And Farnborough will probably withdraw from LARS once it has its airspace up and running.
Why have they lost the appeal? Why does the UK CAA not weigh in the requirements of this nearby gliding club? Did the judges say that, simply, the interests of Farnborough/TAG and their passengers must outweigh?
Farnborough have already stated publicly that the average number of passengers using their airport, per flight, is (from memory) 1.5 or so! It is hard to get more damning than this admission. What a waste of a huge airport and airspace.
Look at this and try to work out how to fly there. This pic is only slightly tongue in cheek…
Then think that any bust will send you to the new CAA infringement processing machinery. If you get Gasco 1st time (as many do) then the 2nd one likely gets your license suspended.
Now throw in a chunk of Class D for Farnborough, and a tower there which “may” give you a transit. If it doesn’t, or doesn’t call you back (as often happens with UK CAS) then you have to do a very rapid dogleg, and try working out where you will do the dogleg to. If your dogleg touches an ATZ then you may get busted and Farnborough Radar data will be made available to support the action against you (as per Barton, with Manchester).
I have now stopped flying in this “2300ft” airspace because it is just too risky, under the new zero-tolerance CAA regime. But most GA based around the south east flies around there; it takes them to their popular watering holes.
boscomantico wrote:
Why have they lost the appeal?
I think that is/will be explained in the written judgement distributed to the parties. I don’t know if it is publically available.
Did the judges say that, simply, the interests of Farnborough/TAG and their passengers must outweigh?
The problem with the old Airspace Change Proposal process (referred as CAP 725) is that there is no appeal system built-in. So you are left with the only possibility of the Judicial Review.
My understanding is that the Judicial Review is mostly on whether the process was followed and not on whether the wheighing of argument for and against the ACP was fair.
Why does the UK CAA not weigh in the requirements of this nearby gliding club?
Good question.
Part of it is their flawed logic that too many and too disparate traffic in the same airspace volume => risk => only solution is controlled airspace.
boscomantico wrote:
Why have they lost the appeal? Why does the UK CAA not weigh in the requirements of this nearby gliding club? Did the judges say that, simply, the interests of Farnborough/TAG and their passengers must outweigh?
Not really. Without having read the detail, the judicial review arguments were along the lines of the CAA exceeding their authority in granting the controlled airspace. I don’t know what points of law they made to support that but there must have been some, however tenuous.
If is unfortunate that it was really the only avenue of appeal. In a judicial review one is appealing on the grounds that something was not done properly, per the process, or per the law.
The reality is that the process and law almost certainly were followed properly. It’s just that the decision reached was a bad one and probably a foregone conclusion with the applicant working hand-in-glove with the regulator, against which there is no real right of appeal.
Peter wrote:
This pic is only slightly tongue in cheek…
There is not a single NoGo zone on there which I don’t fly through very regularly. Talk about FUD.
Timothy wrote:
There is not a single NoGo zone on there which I don’t fly through very regularly. Talk about FUD.
You very regularly fly through the firing ranges at Pirbright?
Odiham usually like transiting aircraft to avoid their ATZ too. The standard MATZ penetration clearance from Farnborough includes the words “remaining outside the ATZ”.
Now the HIRTA, I know a lot of us blast through these. But frankly from the way they are represented on the chart, we ought not to. If they’re no big deal, take them off the chart :-)
He did say the picture was (only slightly) tongue in cheek, and some of it (Gatwick, Solent, Heathrow) might only be available with certain routings that obviously one has to know about, and at (low) levels that may be thoroughly undesirable to those of us without a second horse in harness.
You can easily go over the ranges and Odiham ATZ and the HIRTA only matters if you spend enough time there.
Getting through Gatwick and Solent is harmless. There are routes through Heathrow.
This is what I mean by FUD. Why can we not help people cope, rather than fill them with gloom?
