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National CAA policies around Europe on busting pilots who bust controlled airspace (and danger areas)

There are reports in Internet forums by pilots that claim they got busted. As these cases are not published officially before there is a final court ruling (which would take years even if the pilot challenges the fine in front of a court), there is obviously no hard proof that it has actually happened but the reports sound credible.

I suggest asking for evidence.

Researching actual court cases tends to be harder. We had a funny one around here which led to a noisy departure of some people. It is a fertile area for disputes because some legwork is usually needed to search some courthouse records, and just arguing on the internet is much easier. For stuff which is big enough to make the newspapers, searching their archives can be productive… there are people who do this for a living. But a lot of this stuff is getting removed from google in Europe nowadays; there was a famous GDPR test case in the UK around this.

If somebody wrote on facebook that they got busted, they are already telling a potentially huge number of people (even if suitably limited on fb, lots of people repost “juicy” stuff elsewhere; I receive an awful lot of it myself ) so why not ask them directly?

Over the years I have read of a lot of German “prosecutions” which turned out to have no conclusion and probably didn’t happen.

Unfortunately CAAs tend to employ people with personalities which have a tendency to want to “set somebody straight” (the ex national air force / security / ex police etc) so one gets a lot of stupid actions, which fail if a good (read: expensive) lawyer is appointed – example.

The system runs along because most pilots can’t or won’t spend the money to get justice; most pilots who get busted are people who simply fly a lot (because most busts are random mistakes) and most of those are business / professional people and most of those have a well developed reflex for extracting a cheque book from their pocket whenever they face a challenge in life

The CAAs, certainly the UK one, play on this by offering costs of X with a Guilty plea and costs of 5X with a NG plea if found G. It is a disreputable but not illegal practice. The result is good for the CAA because it maximises FUD while avoiding the creation of case law

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Peter wrote:

The CAAs, certainly the UK one, play on this by offering costs of X with a Guilty plea and costs of 5X with a NG plea if found G.

Don’t the courts set the fine in the UK? In anglo-saxon law jurisdictions, the prosecutor normally will request/suggest a fine, but the court decides what it will be.

Regarding the DFS document, this sounds a bit like an attempt to anticipate and preempt potential issues resulting from FRA. Pre-FRA, routes were generally pre-defined to avoid such airspaces. Of course there has always been the possibility to code DCT so the issue is not entirely new. But with FRA it seems more likely that there will be a lot of A-B direct routing that bumps into D-, R-, P- airspace.

LSZK, Switzerland

The court sets the fine but to that you add the “costs” which the CAA applies for. That’s the “variable incentive” portion

But with FRA it seems more likely that there will be a lot of A-B direct routing that bumps into D-, R-, P- airspace.

Hmmm, one would think that they would have thought of that before introducing FRA… How is FRA supposed to work otherwise? It is CAS, all of it, surely? So all that changes is that more ATC desks are needed because there is more CAS (that’s incidentally why the UK likes Class G: it is cheap).

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

chflyer wrote:

The CAAs, certainly the UK one, play on this by offering costs of X with a Guilty plea and costs of 5X with a NG plea if found G.
Don’t the courts set the fine in the UK? In anglo-saxon law jurisdictions, the prosecutor normally will request/suggest a fine, but the court decides what it will be.

There is cases where the “winning” party (here the CAA) can ask the judge to rule on the “loosing” party (here the pilot) paying its legal cost. And the legal cost for the CAA would be much higher in the case of a not guilty plea.

Nympsfield, United Kingdom

As posted previously, some UK DAs have no byelaw and thus you cannot be prosecuted for busting these. The CAA probably can and probably will still “bust” you though, they just need to hope that you will cave in and not take it to a court.

The MOD compiled a list of byelaws for its defence lands, available here local copy and as you can see quite a number of them have no byelaw.

Those reviewed in the past two decades are listed at
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/reviewed-mod-byelaws/mod-byelaws-reviewed-since-2004

Both documents can be found here

If you open some of these at random you’ll find they say nothing regarding aircraft flying overhead. Others prescribe areas which are far smaller than what the UK VFR charts depict, eg Cape Wrath off Sutherland in the Highlands, D801 and D802. The chart shows these extending a little more than 20 miles north of the coast and up to 55000 AMSL. Whereas, the byelaw (see first pdf above) on p 5 says the area extends over the sea only to 3 miles, which corresponds to the territorial waters of the UK.

A separate interesting Q is what happens with DA and CAS busts which are outside the 3 mile UK territorial limit. There is a lot of these e.g. the D038/D039 lot south of the Isle of Wight. And of course there is a huge amount of CAS which is beyond the 3 mile limit.

Does anyone know of anybody who got busted for any of these?

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

We were watching a YouTube sailling video (of a couple of people doing a round Britain sail, leaving from Wales) and one of the things they pointed out was the charted ‘live firing range’ off the south Wales coast that is active during certain days of the week. They explained if you sail in there they will try to call you on the radio and request you leave the area, and that would be that.

Why is it pilots are dealt with so much more harshly than sailors if they inadvertently enter a danger area?

Andreas IOM

Because of the “personality cult” of the types of people who end up working in the CAAs.

And because pilots are sh*t scared of their CAA, which can terminate their flying career at any time, without an explanation or appeal.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

It probably helps when you don’t need any form of licence or permission to sail your own boat in the UK. Whereas the CAA can and will suspend your licence if they choose to do so.

I think what happens is that there isn’t much overall control and the rogue ‘interesting personality’ types end up accidentally (as far as senior leadership is concerned) taking the organisation down a difficult road on a particular issue.

Danger areas and the Barton Interpretation are two examples. These ‘interesting’ sorts start enforcing a particular thing, and it becomes embedded policy before anyone a bit smarter becomes wise to the regulatory inconsistency – which in these cases are that it isn’t an offence to enter a danger area unannounced, and that you don’t actually have to talk to A/G or AFIS to enter an ATZ. By the time senior leadership works out what’s going on (because it’s usually us that spots the anomaly, not them) it would be too much hassle (pilots already disciplined and ‘re-educated’) and an unacceptable loss of face to sort it out properly, so the only realistic option is to double-down on the new interpretation whilst working quietly behind the scenes to get the regs changed so as to explicitly support it.

I would not be at all surprised to see little ANO amendments in the next year or so to bring the regs into line with CAA practice on those two issues. There may well be others.

EGLM & EGTN

The territorial waters of the UK have gone from 3nm to 12 nm in 1987.
So possibly the by-law hasn’t been updated since

Nympsfield, United Kingdom
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