In the UK, and in any other civilised justice system, you are innocent until proven guilty. The problem here is that the CAA suspends your license as soon as “the committee” has decided thus – usually about 1-2 months after the alleged offence – so you are declared guilty at that point.
This resembles to good old Stalin and his methods.
A variation on Godwin’s Law perhaps? One (Joseph) is not far from the other (Adolf)… ;-)
in continental Western Europe, for such egregious cases, the police has quick access (by mobile phone / radio) to a prosecutor / judge / prosecuting judge that will issue the provisional licence suspension.
I have never heard of that, so I did a bit of quick research and found nothing.
In the UK, pre-CPS, it was fairly common for the police to “fix people up”, not so much for something they didn’t do at all (though that happened too, though mostly with people who were “not angels” to start with) but by altering a lot of details e.g. if you were followed at 50mph in a 30, they would increase it to 65 and that (being more than 30 over) got you a much stiffer sentence.
But they still could do nothing until the court case. This is where the CAA has a lot more power: they can “finish you” just a few weeks after the offence, and then you are left hanging for months.
Normally, NATS will contact you within a day or two, and then the CAA contacts you (for much the same thing) a day or two after they got your NATS reply from NATS. Then the CAA man writes to you, email and post, a week or few weeks later, with your sentence. In some cases he phones you to make sure. So, fairly obviously, if you have already done Gasco and per cap1404 your next stage is a suspension, you have nothing to lose by delaying the responses to NATS and the CAA. I am reliably informed that some pilots take months to respond, which is not surprising. You don’t want to get grounded during the summer, for example. And everybody is entitled to be on a holiday etc when the comms from NATS arrive.
I think Lionel is referring to a juge d’instruction or examining magistrate. You need to watch Engrenages more 
One of my customers had this exact scenario: he was ‘fixed up’ by the police for speeding more than he really was. The interesting point is that his lawyers very strongly recommended against calling the policeman a liar in court; instead they went through datasheets of the radar unit and found something that was out of tolerance. Essentially, don’t fight the system but find a technicality.
Capitaine wrote:
Essentially, don’t fight the system but find a technicality.
Here is a good example,
https://arxiv.org/abs/1204.0162
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1204.0162.pdf local copy
To be clear it is not about his innocence (only him knows the truth) or fighting the system but there “were three physical phenomena combined at just the right time to misled the officer” I recall this one was far more fun than reading his network/graph theory papers
Peter when you attended GASCo was the Barton gotcha explained to the attendees, and was it explained SPECIFICALLY how to avoid a bust of a AFISO ATZ?
Peter wrote:
of a helicopter pilot who got done by the CAA, following a suspension last summer. This pilot doesn’t appear to have done himself any favours in his conduct on the radio but the whole thing has the footprints of “CAA getting very personal” all over it
I wouldn’t make this incident your “poster child”. From a more detailed report, it appears the pilot made a egregious airspace violation (funnily enough of Rule 11) – not just a ‘slight nick’ of a corner of airspace or a vertical bust lasting only seconds – while ranting on frequency. From what I’ve seen, there is zero evidence of "footprints at all of the CAA “getting very personal”" on this one.
I wonder where this “your poster child” phrase comes from? Jason used it above as well – and without offering any better contribution. It’s cheap and gratutious. Nobody is putting up a “poster child”. For evidence of “personal”, compare this with how a similar traffic offence would be handled. You could also obtain information additional to what was in the papers; additional info is always worth having 
was the Barton gotcha explained to the attendees, and was it explained SPECIFICALLY how to avoid a bust of a AFISO ATZ?
My Gasco notes are here.
No, nothing specific to a AFIS or A/G ATZ was mentioned, IIRC.
I read your GASCo notes, Peter, and they specifically mention a bust of the Barton ATZ:
There was a one example of an ATZ bust, where a pilot was avoiding a line of CBs in the Manchester/Liverpool low level route. He got a transit from Manchester, all very correctly, but upon exiting their CAS he just about busted the edge of the Barton ATZ. The bust was reported by an eye witness (a pilot in the Barton circuit) and then Manchester helped things along by confirming the pilot’s position and Mode C altitude within the ATZ, from its radar data. I thought this was a poor example because a lot of pilots, especially working under pressure, would have naturally got caught up expecting a better service from Manchester ATC which – as per UK practice – washed their hands of him the instant he left their CAS.
As an interesting angle, the UK ANO clauses which the CAA uses, via CAP1404, to suspend licenses may themselves be illegal, under EU regs.
Right to a fair trial V CAP1404:
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1998/42/schedule/1/part/I/chapter/5
Article 6 is the principle overriding legal mechanism upon which our guilt or innocence stands. However under CAP1404 the CAA have decided that they can remove (suspend) your licence even though at that point you have not been found guilty, 6.2 refers.
Even though the CAA state that they have passed CAP1404 through their legal team, they appear to have missed this point. Furthermore as this is a “criminal” offence, why is the CPS not involved somewhere in the process? The CAA shold only be acting like policemen in this matter, ie collecting evidence, (note you are NOT allowed to self incriminate by filling out a witness form). Any decent barrister can drive a coach and horses through their process.
Apparently someone got this opinion from high powered lawyers.
This would be equally applicable to other countries in Europe.
