My (and others’) assertion is that most CAS busts go straight to Gasco. These are the low hanging fruit. Mode S, some Mode C. CAIT software flags them, NATS 100% reports them to the CAA and it is dead easy for the CAA to bust these pilots.
Of the (say) 1300 busts it is obvious that most don’t go to Gasco. Gasco’s processing capacity is around 250 a year. Many are ATZ etc busts which range from unenforceable through “difficult should the offender decide to contest it in a court” to “dubious since there is no law which says busting a particular D area is illegal”. Also NATS don’t report them so more work there also for the CAA. Very possibly 80% of the 1300 get a warning.
Most May busts won’t have been processed by the CAA yet. They take a month from the time they get your report to sending you the letter telling you that you have 90 days to do the Gasco thing. Throw in the max time the pilot has to do the NATS report, then do the CAA report (both of which BTW suggest there won’t be any action; this is just data collection for safety) and a May bust may not get processed till say July/August. So I have no idea why the CAA has just published the enforcement routes for busts done in May.
Note also that the sentence “Safety intervention measures implemented including, for example, avoiding action, radar vectors, cessation of departures, holding” is disingenuous since every NATS report includes the words that avoiding vectors etc were passed to some airliner.
Peter
you wrote " since every NATS report includes the words that avoiding vectors etc were passed to some airliner."
Now I understand why you post so much here, you have access to all the MORs. Please can you provide us with more details of the 1300 odd reports from 2018?
Very funny 
EuroGA exists for the well-being of GA in Europe.
One of the FOIA requests asked for a breakdown for Jan/Feb/Mar 2018 and 2019, for which complete figures can be provided. Nothing meaningful can be done for May 2019, so it is a mystery why the CAA picked that month. Maybe it was another FOIA request?
Anyway, this release makes a mockery of the CAA claims (to the FOIA applicants) that releasing who gets which route would reveal personal data.
It should be simple enough to resubmit FOI requests for previous months’ data, you can even ask for it in the same format.
Probably easier to make new submissions than appeal old ones.
See previous posts for the actual CAA responses. They refused, citing that they would be releasing personal data. This is nonsense, which presumably is why the FOIA requests are being taken to the next stage, etc.
Asking for previous months would meet with the same refusal for the same reason.
I don’t agree, the voluntary data release today is an admission that the personal data exclusion doesn’t apply. They’ve killed their own argument.
Hold on guys, for May, ignoring closed with no further action (as probably there was no case to answer) and ongoing investigations (therefore indetermined and irrelevant) there was a total of 33 cases, of which 23 ended up on the course, which I make as near as 70%, but if you exclude the 3 who were probably always facing prosecution, thats 23 out of 30, which is nearly 80% of cases followed up on the course.
That is very different from the position Timothy suggested, and supports Peter’s earlier assertions, does it not!
There were only 32 cases dealt with, which given this is a rolling number, suggests a startling degree of incompetence in dealing with the cases, or a stunning degree of inaccurate statistical account. I cant think what else it could be given the number of cases each month is relatively static, or there is a huge backlog. Have I missed the obvious?
Of course if we had the earlier numbers perhaps it is down to the much lower numbers months before over the winter when of course flying hours are much reduced.
Why would I think we may have been mislead?
Why would I not be surprised if a lot more pilots find themselves on the course over the coming months?
I think this may become a whole lot more controversial, unless we find GASCo just cant cope.
Fuji_Abound wrote:
Have I missed the obvious?
Yes. Not all the reported infringements (163 in May) ends up been reviewed by the Infringement Coordination Group.
They reviewed 42 in May, discarded 7, deferred 3, 23 ended up on the course. What we don’t know is which month reported infringements the 42 where selected from.
If they were selected from April it is 26 out of 117 = 22%
If they were selected from January it is 26 out of 64 = 41%
We could also assume that they are struggling to process all the reported infringements. But why analyse only 42 this month. doesn’t sound like a round number bureaucrats would like. And based on March or April they would deal with only a third or half of the incoming infringements. I know the CAA is not renowned for its timely processing of license and that they lack staff in certain areas but even them would recognise that building a backlog 3 time faster than dealing with it is not going to work very long.
So on probability, I’d say the CAA is bad at being transparent and releasing data often enough and in a whole set that can be analyse but we’re not mislead.
The interesting fact from these stats is that nobody has been asked to do the online test. That might indeed be a change of policy. Maybe it’s linked to the unrelevant and deprecated question of the test and the disconnect with the tutorial.
May 2019 makes no sense no matter how you look at it.
If it is offences committed in May then they won’t have been dealt with for some time later and certainly not now. There is
If it is cases on which the “final processing decision” was made in May, those will have been offences whose date will be spread over the preceeding couple of months.
So it is a totally daft exercise and not worth examining.
Except, yes, the zero number of people sent down to the online tutorial and the fake infringments exam with its bogus questions. And it does look like most go to Gasco. Well we knew all that.
What is also worrying is license suspensions on repeat offenders. Not on all (one delegate reported being told that Gasco have seen a few repeat “customers”) but clearly some get their license pulled on the 2nd bust. Note that one of the FOIA responses said that “repeat” is within 2 years assuming it didn’t go to a court. No info on how serious these were, and some (few) clearly are serious.
You know, I wonder if perhaps the relavent people in the CAA didnt think anyone would ask (or hoped they wouldnt) about the numbers and statistics for their “new regime” concerning airspace busts. After all, the pilot representative bodies havent been particularly vocal about this. In the past the only thing that mattered was how many were prosecuted through the courts and the fact that there were “xxx” number of airspace busts a year. So I actually have a sneeking suspicion that they havent actually tracked anything properly right up until these FOI requests and that is why they only have the review board results for May 2019…I believe it might actually be Cock-up over conspiracy, because to the people who brought out this system, going on a £200 course (they arent thinking in terms of total hassle/cost) isnt a punishment.
Regards, SD..
