Off_Field wrote:
To go to back your car analogy, it would be like someone getting prosecuted for doing 61 in a 60.
To my non-flying colleagues I usually describe the airspace east of EGKB the following way:
imagine that you should not be driving slower than 24mph and if you drive faster than 25 mph, like 25.01, you get busted immediately (speed cameras are every 25 meters). And you never REALLY know what is the penalty, at worst – driving ban for a year. No court. Or there is but you are still banned while it lasts.
Malibuflyer wrote:
The question is, at which transponder-reading the CAA actually starts prosecution. Do they really go after pilots that fly with a 1600 reading if the airspace starts at 1500?
It took me a while to go through the thread but NealCS was busted for far less
“I was invited onto one of these (UK) GASCO courses last year after a 9 second 32ft bust of the London TMA from below at a notorious pinch-point between Farnborough and the London TMA -I was aware I had done it as I took avoiding action of same level conflicting traffic at which moment SkyDemon bleeped at me as I descended but I thought it was so momentary it was a non-issue and flew on, only to get a letter a few weeks later…”
Update on the UK numbers from the usual place
Notable bits are: The number getting sent down to gasco remains well down, compared to past times when they always stuffed the “course” to capacity (about 20-25) and the rest got warning letters. And the suspensions no longer state (as they always did before) that someone busting post-gasco got suspended. Now they are suspending after “retraining” which may be gasco, or not. The gasco “course” is not any form of training; it is a day being lectured in a room, with no examination of what the pilot did. But it may be just different language…
I don’t see how they can run gasco with the virus, anyway. Does anyone know? I know vast numbers of people read this thread, including half the CAA, so somebody must know. You get 90 days to do the assigned gasco day but the virus lockdown has been running for longer. The CAA refuses to accept a cheque due to the virus so it would be a bit rich of them to put people in a closed room. The risk of an all-day sitting is huge; on the news today was that it persists for several hours.
No June update on actual busts
Notably ATZ busts are way down. I wonder if there has been a quiet change of policy, after the Barton debacle?
FWIW, hilariously, I got banned from Flyer (a UK GA “boycott every airport over £10” chat site 
) for posting on this topic. They have shut down loads of infringement related threads, likely due to high CAA/NATS presence, posting under various nicknames.
If pilots are doing stupid, dangerous and often illegal things by not turning on transponder, ads-b, etc. you can’t blame the CAA
And there we have a fundamental, perhaps cultural, disagreement. I do blame the UK CAA for creating a regulatory environment which encourages, nay practically obliges, pilots to do “stupid, dangerous and often illegal things”.
It was not always so. The UK CAA has a proud history of moulding UK regulations so that ordinary people can easily and safely comply. The UK IMC rating is perhaps the most salient example. In contrast, most of the UK CAA’s European counterparts make it all but impossible for ordinary pilots to obtain and retain basic instrument flying skills. Those Euro NAAs are smugly content to watch people kill themselves by infringing regulations which are deliberately made difficult to obey.
I want to know: why can’t the GASCo course be done on Zoom? It would be cheaper for everyone involved, including GASCo themselves, and have the same result. The BGA for instance has been doing inspectors courses and Human Factors courses by video conferencing during the lockdown (something very useful to me, as it’s reduced what would be around £1000 worth of travel and hotels to £0).
It would be much less inconvenient, presumably.
The whole point is to give the pilot an unpleasant taste in the mouth, blow away a few hundred quid, and demonstrate that “something is being done” by the CAA.
I bumped into one CAA/NATS guy some months ago and simply asked why don’t they just stop doing this. His reply was along the lines of “how will we then show that we are taking action”? He made no attempt to justify the action being taken. @AF was sitting next to me.
Peter wrote:
The whole point is to give the pilot an unpleasant taste in the mouth, blow away a few hundred quid,
They claim that it isn’t supposed to do those things, nor be a punishment. To prove this, they should be open to changing it to an online format, with perhaps one or two a year for those who absolutely can’t do it online.
Unfortunately that would require them to do what they claim.
Malibuflyer wrote:
It get’s a little bit tricky when you leave the airspace C/D and need to reenter it. Some believe you need a new clearance, others believe the old clearance is still valid.
Sent a mail to the CAA to get an explanation of how tings works and are supposed to work. Got an answer from the CAA yesterday, by phone… The old clearance is definitely not valid, but the Flight Plan is, all the way. Talking strictly VFR now. What a flight plan does is to assure you get “information” (along the route) and SAR in uncontrolled airspace, and a “heads up” to ATC in controlled airspace (as well as SAR of course). When in uncontrolled airspace, some controllers (information in this case) will tell you to change frequency when appropriate, others will not. Those who do, are simply nice, they help you along, but they have no obligation to do so.
The funny thing is that Norwegians seems to sort this out somehow en route, but foreigners seldom do. He (who had been working at the ATC for years) told me that they often find foreign GA planes outside Bodø for instance still tuned in to frequencies several sectors south they could as well have turned the radio off.
A FP is therefore always a good thing if you want to get from A to B with the least amount of fuzz (flying through bits of C/D and bits of G). It will not give you any clearances, implicit or otherwise, but the ATC will know about you, making it easier for them to give you the clearance you want, and you will receive information for your route in G. It’s not that long ago I couldn’t care less about filing FPs, didn’t see any advantage whatsoever. He could assure me there is. Without a FP, you will have to “explain” your intentions several times for instance.
LeSving wrote:
The funny thing is that Norwegians seems to sort this out somehow en route, but foreigners seldom do. He (who had been working at the ATC for years) told me that they often find foreign GA planes outside Bodø for instance still tuned in to frequencies several sectors south they could as well have turned the radio off
I don’t quite understand. In Germany, if you are in contact with Langen Information, you will always get a handover to a different sector by them, even without a FP. So while you can see the different sector frequencies on the chart, you are not expected to switch on your own, rather you will be told whom to contact and when.
