Mentioned here is the latest earth shattering UK CAA advice on how to avoid infringements!
Seems very burdensome. Why is this airspace infringement thing such a big deal in the UK only?
Snoopy wrote:
Seems very burdensome. Why is this airspace infringement thing such a big deal in the UK only?
I think because the policy is so poorly thought out and has so little or no tolerance.
I also think it spacks of one rule for CAT and another for GA.
Fuji_Abound wrote:
I also think it spacks of one rule for CAT and another for GA.
More like for GA and everybody else – military pilot are exempt from all the three-strike rules.
I have never met anyone who knows what triggered the new UK policy, around 3 years ago. But most agree it is a freelance operation within the CAA/DfT which the chief exec of either has not been aware of. Well, I know for a fact that the current head of the DfT is aware of it…
The CAA CAP 1840 guidance looks like good common sense – a planning checklist which could be adapted according to the complexity of the airspace/FPL, the equipment onboard (e.g. with redundancy there might be no need for a printed plog), and the experience/currency of the pilot. It’s good that they promote the use of moving map gps. Frankly I’d find it a challenge to negotiate my way through today’s airspace in SE England without SkyDemon, particularly the radar/profile view which is a brilliant flight planning tool. I have no connection to either of the aforementioned parties, but credit where credit’s due 
It’s got to be related to some flamboyant arguments from CAT operators, not happy about costs if there are any delays, but dressing it up as a safety concern to push the point home.
Yes there are safety concerns and rightly so. Some infringements have been so massively incompetent and have scattered airliners , but these are very rare.
A flight along a boundary 20 miles long is obviously aware of the boundary so if it drifts a wingtip into CAS it’s got to be obvious what the error is.
If it throws a 90 deg turn toward the overhead that’s different.
The same applies to a small vertical bust.
They blame it on automated systems. Fine these have no discression but the resulting quick analysis could have.
Why is this airspace infringement thing such a big deal in the UK only?
It’s been like this for about two decades.
It’s the way larger airports have been traditionally allowed to exclude all sorts of “undesirable” GA traffic through crazy handling fees and other fees through unregulated privatization. So two sets of worlds: CAT and well funded ATC got all the Class A airspace to exclude the undesirables that were not giving them the money that wanted. And on the other side GA got barely any well maintained airports with hard runways, let alone much form of radar-based air traffic services, grew up in almost parallel universes where one pretended to never know the other.
That was, until air traffic grew so much on both sides of the fence over the years both operating closely to airspace borders with little awareness of one another, and so the infringements problem continued to grow which eventually annoyed the hell out of CAT.
For the first few years of serious infringements, many had denied the actual causes placing blame squarely on GA pilot navigation “issues” and continued to play politics and even threatening to suspend pilot licenses – it’s the cheapest “remedy” after all. And now, after much lobbying over the years, people mostly admit and accept there are many multiple causes, a smaller minority still don’t, yet money remains limited into properly fixing it.
There are longer term airport and airspace “infrastructure” plans and I believe many of the issues will eventually be fixed. Yet it requires some well thought out national transport regulations, funding and incentives. At the rate of change I fear it would be around 2035 before it happens.
It’s been like this for about two decades.
It absolutely has not.
If say 5 years ago you touched CAS, you were told by ATC to get out of it / turn right/left. There was tolerance in the system for reasonable / minor errors.
Now there is zero tolerance
)so the infringements problem continued to grow which eventually annoyed the hell out of CAT.
10 seconds / 100ft ???
Closing down Luton by a 45min “fly-over” does annoy them, but these are of the order of 1% of the total. Gasco was full of people who did little ones which would mostly not have been noticed except for the CAIT automated Mode S / Mode C scanning software.
continued to play politics and even threatening to suspend pilot licenses.
They’re not threatening, they’re actually doing it.
