an absurd airspace structure in the UK
No worse than the impenetrable bits in SE France, Belgium, etc. – What are airspace designers smoking?.
absurd flying regulations (controlled flights in uncontrolled airspace, etc.)
Relevance to busts? It might actually be quite hard to prosecute a pilot flying e.g. an IAP in Class G who busts a bit of Class A under ATC direction… assuming he got himself a lawyer! There are scenarios where a Class G airport ATC can clear you into CAS, so the useful ambiguity exists.
scandalously poor ATC services and poor to non-existant integration of the various agencies
Indeed. But ultimately busting CAS is a navigation error, these happen to everybody (occassionally) via moments of inattention, not understanding how some tablet app works, etc, etc, so this comes down to the process of detecting, reporting, and going after the pilot, and this is where the UK is running a no-prisoners system, and nobody else is (except for “prohibited” areas where France probably leads the field in enforcement often described as clumsy).
very high traffic density in the southeast of the UK
No higher than in other parts of N Europe (on a good day)
pilot training which is mostly stuck in the WWII time. For some reason, this is more the case in the UK than in the rest of Europe.
Is this really a UK-only thing? Is the PPL syllabus different?
I think it seems that way because Brits fly abroad a lot and a fair % of them make fools of themselves doing the War and Peace thing on the radio. So plenty of French, German, etc, pilots see Brits making fools of themselves. But e.g. few French pilots fly outside France (lack of legal ELP; many previous posts) so who is going to judge? And few Germans fly to the UK, for the same old reasons already discussed about people not flying to the UK. In fact most “travelling” pilots in Europe fly either within the UK (if Brits, and bust CAS) or (if not Brits) they fly to countries within Europe where busts are not tightly enforced (everywhere except the UK 
).
I am not aware of objective data saying a particular non UK pilot is better trained than a UK pilot. Obviously, a Swiss trained PPL will know more about mountain flying (flying in the Alpine valleys) than anybody else… And I am certain that a lot of “lack of capability” is concealed by a national flying culture which keeps almost everyone flying in circles around their club and maybe 100nm down the road. IOW, if you send all of N Europe’s PPLs down to say Crete, I am sure the numbers making fools of themselves on the way would be pretty much the same. Like that guy I saw in a Robin at LGKR who got there with a Michelin road map…
Maybe something to do with the fact that old-timers (RAF, etc.) are still very present in UK PPL flight training
The French aeroclub scene is full of ex air force Presidents…
Actually the UK has far fewer ex RAF instructors now than was the case say 30 years ago. I don’t think I ever had one.
thus still many pilots not using GPS
That I am sure is true, but time will tell how many of these end up as “Gasco delegates” 
because most of the “map and compass” crowd are nontransponding and thus hard to track down
a system which seems to catch every single infringement, however minor and irrelevant it may be
Yes that seems a new development; within the past year or less
The adjacent Class G airspace has no TMZ
It would not make much difference because Mode S is easy to track down, Mode C is the minimum needed to go after a non CTR bust, TMZs are Mode C, and most non-Mode-S busts, if non radio, are hard to track down. And Mode A or non TXP busts of non-CTRs are obviously not detectable. You would need a RMZ+TMZ.
How many pilots are now flying around the whole of the south east at 2,200 feet regardless of the airspace for fear of ever infringing?
I would, in the present era. It greatly reduces your chance of getting busted for touching the LTMA for example. The problem is that you have to do it regardless of the conditions i.e. IMC, icing in the winter, etc. and it is likely to be pretty rough in places from the wind turbulence and summer thermals.
In short I think all this is somebody deciding to use a big hammer to address a problem which has no “final solution”. Busts cannot be eliminated; they can merely be controlled at some tolerable level.
Ibra wrote:
You don’t even need to talk to anyone just set a listen sqwak & freq and reduce volume,
Pros and cons, I guess:
If you don’t talk, you manage your own traffic and airspace avoidance. Someone will have to reach out to you to resolve an infringement if it happens, which can take longer.
If you do talk and you have been cleared, the airspace boundary matters far less. ATC can help you avoid real traffic, which matters far more.
But… if you do absolutely everything short of getting a clearance, a bust is a bust and you will get sent down for it, these days.
AFAICT, talking to the CAS owner, or anyone else, just makes it easier for the CAS owner to get you back out of there, and AIUI they are not required to add the 5000ft to your Mode C before declaring an official loss of separation (and “locking the ATCO in the dark room” )
For example if you nip a bit of the Gatwick LTMA while on a listening squawk with Gatwick, even if they call you during/after the “nip” and you get out immediately, you will still get sent down to Gasco. Because, AFAIK, the NATS report is mandatory and its reporting to the CAA is mandatory.
All these things are just one way: they help ATC but give no mitigation to the infringer; the cases I know about suggest that he gets the same treatment. In years past, if they got you out quick, you didn’t get done. In my 2500+ hrs I did maybe a dozen little “nips” of the LTMA, usually while talking to Farnborough. I was told to get out of there. Another time, I flew under the LTMA in QNH1030 after the VFR chart CAS base got changed from FL055 to 5500ft… probably hundreds did the same. Nothing ever came of it.
Peter wrote:
I would, in the present era. It greatly reduces your chance of getting busted for touching the LTMA for example. The problem is that you have to do it regardless of the conditions i.e. IMC, icing in the winter, etc. and it is likely to be pretty rough in places from the wind turbulence and summer thermals.
Still not sure how someone will make it to Wycombe Air Park from France in those conditions ?
For comparison to London, Paris TMA has a “G-airspace Restricted Area” now notamed 24h/24h with a specific frequency for identification
Having mode-S + VFR/IFR flight plan will definitely get you off the hook for a minor bust as things get quickly resolved while you are in the air or when you land as planned
But that seems more the benefit of ATC integration, being able to get flight plans, modeS ID and them able to making judgement calls on the severity of the busts
So merely the problem of the UK is “unknown traffic”…
To pour some gasoline on the fire, on the subject of encouraging GPS usage, isn’t the UK CAA one of two in Europe (with the Dutch CAA being the other) that actually worked with EasyVFR to make a moving map solution available to everyone for free?
@dublinpilot will know the details but I believe it was a NATS initiative, many years ago. May have been more than one.
The CAA here always resisted formally incorporating GPS into the PPL syllabus, because they would then have to mandate schools installing “something” and the schools were very much against anything like that.
It is a real problem because you cannot mandate a given product because it would give that vendor a commercial advantage, and since every nav product is different, which one do you teach?
The best you can do is expose the post-PPL community to it, but the opportunity for that is limited, due to
Obviously the above are generalisations but if you want to reduce the busts which are caused by “simply useless WW1 nav methods” then you need to reach the parts the other beers cannot reach – you have to get the last few %, and they aren’t listening…
Peter wrote:
most avoid going anywhere near “training”
I actually have a couple of “repeat” students, who reach out voluntarily (the plane they fly doesn’t require minimum currency, not for the “revalidation” hour), because they want to understand avionics better, or haven’t flown in a while, want to learn how to do airspace transits, or do trips abroad beyond le touquet.
It’s a non negligible % of people that fly that plane, so I’d tend to think that people don’t shy from “training”, they just shy away from the “let’s bash a couple of circuits, fly in the local area and do a couple stalls” training (which in favour of your point, is what most club of instructors do).
Interesting to see this develop into drilling down to the route causes – a good post from Bosco.
If I had to try and distill that down into one cause then I’d say the biggest difference which makes this a UK problem and not a problem elsewhere is privatised ATC.
Privatised ATC allows NATS to keep a straight face whilst taking a black-and-white view on the matter. They can (with varying degrees of seriousness as the situation demands) take the position that the only acceptable number of infringements is zero. They are a business, contracted to provide a service, and part of the business terms are that un-cleared traffic does not cross certain lines in the sky. If any un-cleared traffic does cross those lines then they can quite reasonably take the view that the other party to the deal (the CAA, which regulates the GA that crossed the line) has failed to keep up their side of the bargain.
Hence the enormous pressure on the CAA coming from NATS.
In other countries ATC operates in an integrated fashion as part of an imperfect system and has to accept that a certain number of infringements is inevitable. They have to rub along with other parts of the system which is all working to try and achieve roughly the same thing and cannot afford to take such black and white view because it would be indefensible as well as counter-productive.
As a final note, the prevalence of Barton in the figures does not surprise me in the least. It is both under (2,000ft base!) and next to CAS with access from one side essentially impossible, as well as having a reputation for both officious FISOs and more than its fair share of beardy tech-averse old-timer pilots.
beardy tech-averse old-timer pilots
You called sir?:)
I bet you not many of these “beardy tech-averse old-timer pilots” end up in the Gasco hotel Most of them won’t have Mode S so tracking them down is a lot of legwork, unless they reveal their identity on the radio.
They can swell up the CAS bust numbers though. I don’t think we have seen numbers on how many busts and where are tracked down to the pilot.
