mancival wrote:
what if the pilot, by mistake, inputs the wrong QNH, so that his barometric altitude appears “legal” to him, but he is in fact inside Class A CAS? Does the transponder broadcast to ATC radar also the QNH along with the barometric altitude?
If you input the wrong QNH and as a result are accidentally inside CAS, that’s on you. The transponder doesn’t broadcast the QNH that is the pilot is using, but it broadcasts flight level and the ATC equipment converts that to altitude based on the QNH set at their end. So yes, you’ll be detected.
I saw a post that said vertical airspace is set by QNH. Not always. I fly past Amsterdam a lot and the lower vertical boundary layer is a flight level. FL 55.
Pig wrote:
I saw a post that said vertical airspace is set by QNH. Not always. I fly past Amsterdam a lot and the lower vertical boundary layer is a flight level. FL 55.
If you’re referring to my post above, I wrote that vertical airspace boundaries are determined by barometric altitude and not GPS altitude.
Vertical airspace can be QNH or FL. The UK has loads of both. Check the VFR chart. For example south of EGKA is it 5500ft and further south it is FL065, later FL075.
There is an ambiguity is that you can come out of EGKA, on the EGKA QNH, at 5400ft, and fly near EGKK airspace, and end up busting that because their QNH is different. The risk is real because almost nobody will be listening to EGKK ATIS… In reality this is not common because the two are close enough together that you would need a big pressure gradient to “gain” 200ft (the CAA will bust you for 100ft into CAS). But if you come out of EGKA and fly a hundred miles north, just below CAS, then the risk is very real.
With CAS as a FL this risk is not there.
Graham wrote:
If you fly mode A for the whole flight it probably won’t raise any suspicion.
Are there really any transponders around which are only mode A these days? IMHO seeing a whole bunch of Mode A targets would rise a heck of suspicion that operating it in mode A is intentional and therefore illegal.
dublinpilot wrote:
That’s far better than pilots huddled away into a dark room where they get lectured to and end up leaving too ashamed to admit their mistake to anyone else, never mind give the opportunity for public discussion and learning.
Absolutely. And people being scared into illegality by a policy which does less to remedy the number of occurrences but simply puts them under ground so to speak.
Are there really any transponders around which are only mode A these days?
I don’t think so; they would be incredibly old. There were basically none when I started in 2000.
IMHO seeing a whole bunch of Mode A targets would rise a heck of suspicion that operating it in mode A is intentional and therefore illegal.
Everybody knows the UK is full of this stuff, including the guy running the scheme. ATC are looking at screens with 50% primary-only traffic all day. Speak to any of them privately; they just laugh. But nobody in the system cares about safety. It’s all about looking good. And they close ranks so tight you could not get a 0.005" feeler gauge between them 
I don’t know who kicked this cock and bull stuff off (a few years ago) but they can climb down as easily as Pootin can climb down from Ukraine. In the CAA/NATS universe you cannot lose face. The schools are openly doing it too; by far the easiest way to bust CAS is when training (or mentoring, as I used to do until this crap started).
Peter wrote:
The schools are openly doing it too; by far the easiest way to bust CAS is when training (or mentoring, as I used to do until this crap started).
There is an accident report about a non-catastrophic mid-air (a glancing blow) where a group of aircraft associated with a particular airfield in the South East were running flights for disabled children. The aircraft would each get airborne as they were ready and follow roughly the same route, not going far from the airfield.
Because it was something of an organised event the AAIB looked at the wider context and the report observed that although the aircraft had transponders, no secondary radar returns were observed. There’s also a comment in there from the airfield about that.
Just spotted a really awful account of somebody’s CAS bust on the UK GA chat site…
The guy busted, very briefly (of the order of tens of seconds apparently) and posted asking what he should do. Astonishingly some told him to phone ATC to apologise! Clearly nothing has been learnt of the “new UK system”. I did exactly that a few years ago, to be told they have not had any busts that day, but my phone call caused someone to have a deeper dig into the data and I got sent straight to Gasco.
This guy has also been sent to Gasco, on apparently his first offence, which shows what a total lie CAP1404 is, especially with all the “just culture” crap in it.
One funny bit is this post by one retired ex NATS guy who was always strongly defending the current scheme
Off the back of some rather unpleasant incidents I think it was simply to gather information across the company on numbers, severity, unit hotspots, controller performance and the like such that this could be used to improve said controller performance (which was at times lacking to say the least) and, back then, help allow us to create packages that we could take out to clubs and/or place online for educational purposes. It was very much for information and education purposes, a small number of us at Terminal Control back then gave up a significant amount of personal time when we chose to get involved with the new infringement work stream. We didn’t do it to persecute, we wouldn’t have done it if that was the plan or the outcome, as I recall we actively pushed against such suggestions within the company and instead argued for more openness and more engagement.
As I type the above it occurs to me that we were starting all this whilst we were still at West Drayton, so probably between fifteen and twenty years ago now. It’s utterly farcical that what was started then has become what it is now. As mentioned before, depressing, and I’m quite happy I am no longer part of it.
p.s. I also think that if it’s now required that all infringements be reported via MOR then it’s an abuse of the MOR scheme.
He will likely contact me now threatening legal action (as he has done before)… He left that site some years ago deleting all his posts (he was an admin there (!!) so was able to do that) on his way out.
Since nobody has come up with an explanation for the current bust-them-all UK system, the above may even possibly be the explanation i.e. it was set up to collect data. There is a lesson to be learnt there: once you set something up, and given that a senior NATS guy is on 100k+, you can’t expect to be able to roll it back, because bread on the table is just that.
In the meantime the CAA busts site shows that nothing whatever has changed in the numbers
There is a gradual improvement in the sentencing, with more getting warning letters, while the Gasco (AIAC) “charity” income stream is being nicely maintained 
The improvement in the form of warning letters is very obviously the result of publicity on EuroGA. The UK sites have been and still are dominated by CAA/NATS staff (in disguise). I see one of them (who had a good go here too, along with a load of others) popping up on there, with a super defensive post bordering on farcical. I guess, once you are in the system, it is a total Stockholm Syndrome job. Not to mention the 100k…
The drift to non-TXP flying continues, with a TCAS1 system showing loads of Mode A targets Any mid-air where at least one aircraft had a means of detecting transponders but the other was non-TXP or Mode A will be squarely the responsibility of the “man who cannot be named” at the CAA.
Thought better of it. Just can’t be bothered with inept posts.
CAA/NATS does not help itself with its employees (current or former) making posts like the above.
