Class E is the good balance between VFR and IFR. To me, the more Class E one country has, the more sensible its regulators are 
Overall, this thread makes you proud to be French (let me enjoy it, it is not this common these days)
My field LFPT has both an ILS and LPV200. The ILS was supposed to be dismantled by DGAC, so they put LPV200, then Paris Airports took management of it, at least for a few years.
It seems to be linked to LFPT as a diversion airport for jet/heavy traffic flying into Paris.
Wrong. Germany has it exactly for this reason, with class E lowered from the usual 2500 feet down to 1700 or 1000 feet in the vicinity of airports with IFR procedures. Very similar to the US.
At many airfields the number of aircraft movements is lamentably low, and when it’s bad weather, albeit usable for Instrument approaches, the number of movements drops off the scale.
I think this forum has a statistically unbalanced bias towards GA IFR flight, real life is quite different.
Of course all the business aircraft (and by that I mean turbine types) are just getting on with it….
What used to be Scottish Class F “Advisory Routes”, (where IFR traffic pretended to be on an airway until it sighted a non-radio non-transponder GA legally flying there), has now sensibly been made Class E+, where you need ATC permission unless you are transponding. If transponding, you can enter it non-radio in VMC.
( Was Class F the first airspace class, named from CVR transcripts provided to the Airprox Board?)
Well, there you have it. Some people hold that ATC is necessary for instrument approaches, even in low traffic environments.
So long as that lobby hold sway, and are unwilling to accept that it is an issue of proportionate risk, we will get very few LPVs to currently VFR airfields in the UK.
So people will scud run or do unpublished approaches, and a proportion will continue to die in the attempt.
I wholeheartedly agree with your safety case, but if the CAA won’t accept it, what next? If not ADSB, what else might warm their feet a little?
At the moment, we believe that unpublished cloud breaks aren’t accounting for nearly as many lives as “scud running”, but nobody has the faintest idea how many unpublished approaches are being flown. Might it help to run a poll here?
Slight thread drift, but it’s a related subject: how to maximise chance of surviving if a cloud break or scud-run goes wrong? I only know know two pilots who have performed a proper blind CFIT; one recovered almost completely from his injuries, the other just hopped out of the wreck, collected his belongings and walked away without a scratch or bruise. Both were flying slow Cessna airplanes, so that may be a pointer to success.
Jacko – it would depend on whether you man CFIT enroute or CFIT during a DIY IAP.
Of the former nearly all are fatal. I know of one with survivors, an instructor and a student on a night navex, who hit a gently sloping hill and got bad leg and other injuries. The FI was not using GPS…
Of the latter, crashes are very rare. I know of one TB20 one, N700S IIRC, near Newtonards. He crashed on the (not planned) missed approach. Eventually he recovered from his injuries. The CAA has said, at a conference I went to c. 10 years ago, that there has not been a single known fatality of a pilot legally using an IMC Rating, which is possible.
I gave a number of examples of fatalities. One can’t be sure what Graham Hill was doing, but he was in a much less good position to be doing a properly planned unpublished approach than we are today, and it is for sure that Philip Garvey and David Norris were not attempting any kind of sensible straight in approach, but were attempting to scud run.
DIY IAP
http://www.aaiu.ie/sites/default/files/report-attachments/REPORT_1998_008.PDF
Dunkeswell crash
Not so sure that one would have been avoided if there was an IAP. Seems like the betting men had a view about the use of A/P.
The question of the autopilot only arose because he was fighting it and the electric trim at tree top level to remain in sight of the surface. Had he engaged it in NAV and RoD at 1800’ and 6nm on a runway QDM none of this would have happened.
That would be equally true whether on a published LPV or a GTN Visual Approach.
For that simple method to work you do need reasonably good vis though and be sure there are no obstacles.
The theory about trying to fight the autopilot is something I find hard to believe because – in my plane at least – you will get very sore arms quickly unless you are built like a gorilla. However I do know that most autopilot owners have never checked their slip clutch torque and don’t check it on preflight either.
