Xtophe wrote:
What is the mechanism by which GA pays for FIS and others in Germany? Is there an annual tax for a/c owner? Is part of the fuel duty directed towards ATC?
I’m not convinced that GA should pay for ATS.
CAS exists for the benefit of commercial operators, thus they should pay the costs of the systems and services (i.e. ATSOCAS) that are required to mitigate the impact on others of the fact that large swathes of airspace are essentially closed off for their exclusive use.
Equally I would be happy for the cost of ATSOCAS to come out of general taxation, if it were deemed a part of essential national infrastructure.
The idea of making GA pay for it is a bit like closing off half the motorway network for the exclusive use of heavy goods vehicles and then making car drivers pay by the mile to use the remainder.
“Not invented here” syndrome? We see it basically all over the world, and Europe is no exception. EASA (and the UK CAA) talk about how they want to have the best environment for GA, and make out as if they are doing some as yet untried and pioneering piece of work, when all they have to do is look across the Atlantic at the United States, where what they ought to be doing has been proven to work for decades at this point.
tmo wrote:
five large FIS sectors (Gdańsk, Poznań, Kraków, Warszawa, Olsztyn) in all of the country, so it is usually quite obvious which frequency to call you
Very few people call London FIS for a service these days (Scottish is a different matter.). There is generally a better service available from nearby units, civilian or military, who have radar, unlike FIS, who do not.
It’s a terrible mess really.
What is stopping the UK from emulating us?
Probably the biggest obstacle to providing a radar service OCAS in the UK is that it would cost of the order of 10-20M a year. I say this on the basis of a figure supplied by NATS of a fully costed H24 radar desk being about 1M a year. Maybe less, because most of the UK’s land area has virtually no GA traffic.
From that you could subtract the cost of the present FIS services, which are staffed by FISOs and who – to comply with ICAO rules on ATC and ATC union rules – are required to pretend they can’t see a radar screen and who are paid much less. Probably about 1M a year for the whole country.
But, the above is “just money”.
However, just providing a radar service would do nothing. Currently, you can be talking to Farnborough Radar and if you as much as touch CAS, before the controller spots it and directs you away from it, you will get busted and sent down to Gasco (if they have room). With the 5000ft/5nm add-on, havoc is fairly likely…
So the solution would need to integrate the controllers providing the “radar FIS” with those doing the CAS. That happens in most of Europe but not in the UK (Solent / Southampton EGHI is one exception, but you still get busted even if talking to them).
And that is really hard. It involves stepping on many peoples’ toes. Empires have been built within the ATC / regulatory bodies.
And then still nothing would be achieved unless the “bust them all” policy is abandoned.
Timothy wrote:
Very few people call London FIS for a service these days
Most of the time that is true but on a sunny summer weekend you can’t get a word in edgeways because everyone is out and about, especially the 10 hours a year crowd who are doing what they were taught and calling up London Info with RT so bad it has to be heard to be believed.
Is the difference in quality of service between Scottish and London just down to traffic volume?
It’s night and day between the two.
Off_Field wrote:
Is the difference in quality of service between Scottish and London just down to traffic volume?
I think that that is a large part of it, but also that it is the principal source of ATSOCAS, so it’s all focused in one place, as opposed to the mess we have in the southern half of England.
This old post by @bathman contains the interesting statistic that 15% of UK CAS busts are by foreign pilots.
This is not surprising given the dodgy practices whereby your IFR clearance is silently terminated by London Info, when inbound to the UK.
This is not reflected as a category in the CAA stats so I wonder what they do with them?
Timothy wrote:
Very few people call London FIS for a service these days (Scottish is a different matter.). There is generally a better service available from nearby units, civilian or military, who have radar, unlike FIS, who do not.
London FIS is actually a pretty good service, its problem is that it doesnt have a radar feed (or at least one it is prepared to acknowledge or use). How simple would it be (? maybe not simple at all) to properly staff London FIS and provide them with a radar feed and enable them to provide a useful service to aircraft OCAS? Perhaps even the LARS service and all the other ad hoc services could be dispensed with.
I suspect if there was a will, there are many ways this problem could be solved, including requiring NATS to give access to their radar feeds for OCAS services – I doubt they would refuse, given the Government controls the golden shares.
As I said earlier, sadly its not going to change any time soon as any of the sources of pressure are ineffective and have variously been bought off or bribed not to cause trouble, so we are rather in the hands of the monkeys and pen pushers, and amusing ourselves with an interesting discussion which is all it will amount to.
It is interesting that the shaker of AOPA UK Martin, was surprise surprise appointed a director of GASCo, so you can imagine there is zero interest there in arguing that the system is deficient in any way. Sadly all the time even what could be our main representative organisation is so ineffective and poorly run there is even less hope.
Quite frankly anyone who feels the present regime is unacceptable and is a memeber fo AOPA UK should ask AOPA UK for a statement of their position on this matter, and, if not satisfied, cease to be a member forthwith.
Peter wrote:
This old post by @bathman contains the interesting statistic that 15% of UK CAS busts are by foreign pilots.This is not reflected as a category in the CAA stats so I wonder what they do with them?
I did ask the question. Apparently, effectively nothing. The most that may happen is a letter is sent to their national equivalent of the CAA who laugh into their glass of wine while chuckling about those stuuupid English (sorry not meant as a political comment).
i am afraid our CAA for various reasons is the laughing stock of Europe. Even CASA told me that they are so exasperated at dealing with the CAA that they wish they could give up.
