I agree 100% but I think litigation always was expensive.
In 1991 I was paying £750/hr+VAT for a partner in a top City firm. Luckily for only a few hours… that’s all it needed for the opposition to collapse.
A judicial review would probably work – if anything, via the weight of dirt which would get dragged out – but, for 100k+ ?
“Could a teacher lose his job via speeding?”
A female teacher was sacked for a drink driving conviction, in her off-duty time.
Malibuflyer wrote:
In most cases it would be extremely easy to not infringe by just keeping 5 NM lateral distance
Yes, I agree, here in Scotland it is extremely easy:
But here, more than a little problematic: 
Incidentally, have you any idea how many cubic miles of English Class G airspace would be gobbled up in your suggested precautionary five nautical mile Grenzschutzbereich ?
What exactly will happen to a foreigner “busting” in the UK? Is it tied to the country on the license? the place one lives? the nationality? the nationality of the aircraft?
See e.g. above.
There is a provision under ICAO for the CAA of where the bust took place to request the pilot’s home CAA to go after him.
What actually happens varies. It’s now clear that with the new UK CAA policy, in most cases, either the CAA doesn’t bother harrassing the foreign CAA or the foreign CAA just laughs and tosses the request in the bin. There are some old examples e.g. the famous one of a Belgian pilot busting the Eastbourne airshow, who chose to come back to the UK to appear in the court case, and got a ~5k fine. But I don’t think I know of anything recent, from the “crazy current policy” timeframe.
I know of one pilot who did a most definitely MOR-able bust at a place which most definitely MORs everything, and he never heard from his home CAA.
I am sure that any non-UK CAA would fall over backwards laughing upon getting a request to hassle one of their pilots over a 200ft CAS incursion. But bigger stuff e.g. shutting down Heathrow for half an hour, would, I am sure, be processed like in the past.
Peter wrote:
The problem here is that the CAA is allowed to freelance, and do it behind closed doors. And the process where they suspend your license right away if you want to go court, and then you are grounded for a long time even if you win, prevents most people taking that route.
That is exactly what I call a dysfunctional legal system! One of the purposes of a legal system in a democracy is to protect the citizens from state arbitrariness. A government agency prosecuting people without solid proof for a pretended transgression that is within the accuracy of the measurement equipment that is claimed to show the transgression is exactly that: State arbitrariness!
Obviously your legal system doesn’t protect you against this – hence it is dysfunctional.
Im a legal system that is really “as good as the best anywhere in the world”, there is an established process that an agency decision can only have negative consequences for the citizen if a final four ruling finds him guilty. So in the case of the CAA, there would be a process that any license suspension can only become effective after a court has decided.
I’m not claiming that the German system in general is better than the UK one – but in these specific cases the UK legal system is obviously failing miserably!
LeSving wrote:
What exactly will happen to a foreigner “busting” in the UK? Is it tied to the country on the license?
As it is a license action, the UK CAA will send the file to the national CAA for execution. The national CAA will check the case and invoke the respective actions – if and even if they don’t fall from the chair laughing because some CAA wants to prosecute a pilot for a “transgression” which is within the measures,ent (in-)accuracy of the equipment. In that case they do nothing as they know that any judge in Germany also can’t stay on her chair ;-)
Yes, indeed, the UK CAA should have never been given the power it has, and be able to vest it in basically one person working behind closed doors, as well as popping up around the internet posting in an “interesting style” and then inviting people who engaged with him online “for a chat” at his office, or threatening them with his “legal team”.
However, nobody wants a system which takes you to an expensive court case for every minor thing. That’s why we have fixed penalty traffic offences. A few years ago, driving a rented car from Friedrichshafen to Stuttgart, in heavy rain and with a useless satnav, I went through 3 cameras. Some of these had an amazingly low limit; I recall the ones on the main road through Hagnau being something like 20km/h. Someone in Germany paid the fines for me and I sent him the money by paypal. They came to something like €100. I think, assuming people agree on the need for speed cameras (not everybody does) then this is a reasonable system – provided the system is set up for a margin which, in the UK, is generally 10% plus 3mph (i.e. 80mph in a 70mph limit).
Now, if you did three cameras in the UK you would get 9 points, and 12 is an automatic ban for 6 months. There may be a 3 month option now. Each offence expires after 3 years. The system is generally accepted. IIRC, multiple cameras in one day doesn’t get you a ban because it didn’t give you an "opportunity to learn from your crimes.
But a 6 month driving ban is not like a 6 month pilot license suspension (which is roughly what you get here if you want your case heard in a court). In a car it means paying a taxi firm for 6 months. I got a 6 month ban in the 1980s and it came to about £100/month – billed to the company of course In a plane it means a corroded engine (30k?) and a big loss of currency (a significant danger of death, especially as the average pilot in the UK (and Germany, etc) does only 20-30hrs/year anyway).
So a different punishment system needs to be found, which doesn’t have such a dramatic penalty at the end.
But that’s only if “punishment” is always the desired outcome. Most pilots (perhaps not most on UK GA social media, which nowadays is a pretty aggressive place, dominated by CAA/NATS staff, current or retired) would not support that. Most would support ATC just doing their job and telling them to get out of there – unless it is one of the rare total cockups which shuts down an airport, on which most support serious action (even if it is just some navigation training; most of those cases involve people doing exactly what they were taught in the PPL, with a map and a stopwatch and looking for f******g VRPs which nobody can find). It is no coincidence that at every CAA/NATS/Gasco/etc presentation they dig out one of the “Luton shut for 45 mins by a total muppet” radar videos; they know nobody will have a problem with it, but if they pulled out the last “confidential” MOR listing showing loads of busts for 100-200ft there would be a mass walkout
Anyway we have done all this to death before. One can start with this RAF Just Culture procedure.
Malibuflyer wrote:
I’m not claiming that the German system in general is better than the UK one – but in these specific cases the UK legal system is obviously failing miserably!
Completely agree with Malibuflyer here. The UK legal system is well established and internationally respected.
The policy discussed in the thread, however, does not seem to be subject to the same degree of legal scrutiny as it would be in Germany, where everyone can very easily summon the courts to examine such a policy and most people of pilot level income have legal insurance which means they wouldn’t even have to pay a cent extra to do so. Legal insurance is also quite cheap, mine costs 150€/year or so…
If DFS and LBA created the same airspace infringement persecution system as the UK CAA, it would be shot down by some Verwaltungsgericht (administrative court) within months.
And CAAs must laugh when they receive files from the brits saying plane X busted a TMA by 200 meters or 50 feet
