Silvaire wrote:
The next Congressional election is in two years, not four. Carefully designed stuff.
I know and I agree. As it goes, it may well mean that Congress will be in a lame duck situation again.
What I meant was however the current ping – pong at the WH. Each president cancelling out the previous one with EO’s and even trying to overrule Congress with the latter. That does not make sense.
Just as the designers of the Federal government intended, castration of centralized power.
From here
Only, the UK pulled the plug, not the EU/EASA. That is a self-inflicted wound.
I disagree. It would be easy for a friendly EU to continue to recognise UK-issued Part-FCL licences in the same way that a friendly UK continues to recognise EU-27 issued licences.
But the EU Commission has decided not to be friendly. From confiscating ham sandwiches in a trucker’s picnic, to banning shellfish caught in UK waters, to closing the Irish border, to punishing their own citizens who hold UK-issued EASA licences, the Commission is acting like a petulant child trying to pick a fight.
Quite what this Berlaymont belligerence is supposed to achieve is a matter for conjecture, but if is intended to make the Brits sorry to have left the Union, or to drive a wedge between the people of Britain and continental Europe, it is doomed to fail. What it may do is to convince many British and continental Europeans that the EU has become an odious political cult which will, in time, follow previous pan-European governments into extinction.
Jacko wrote:
Only, the UK pulled the plug, not the EU/EASA. That is a self-inflicted wound.I disagree. It would be easy for a friendly EU to continue to recognise UK-issued Part-FCL licences in the same way that a friendly UK continues to recognise EU-27 issued licences.
Sorry Jacko, has to disagree with you – people of UK voted to leave the EU first, and then voted for (almost) hard Brexit (by voting for tories) second. All self-inflicted.
The UK now IS a third country and has to be treated as such because it is not guaranteed that it will follow the same standards and could be less safe.
Do you really believe that?
mh, sorry, are you asking me? Yes, I do believe that for many pro-Brexit business leaders the whole point was less regulation and less oversight. In some cases it will work, but in other cases it won’t. In other words, if a country voted to be free of almost all obligations (it could have easily been “Norway+” style of deal, with ONLY workforce moving freely and to be still in the ECJ etc), and be able to act like, for example, Russia or Turkey or Australia, then why it has to be treated differently than Russia or Turkey or Australia? Previous history will no longer matter because you have no way to guarantee the same level of safety.
Peter wrote:
I would not be surprised if the CAA is still being pragmatic about it. After all, they are accepting EASA pilot papers for 2 more years; something which Brussels has not reciprocated.
Of course that’s how it works. The CAA doesn’t have a choice. The UK has gone from being a rule maker to being a rule taker. Totally, 100% self-inflicted.
Boris got Brexit done. Boris said he’d got a fantastic deal. You can’t keep blaming the EU for what your government did or didn’t sign up to.
Jacko wrote:
I disagree. It would be easy for a friendly EU to continue to recognise UK-issued Part-FCL licences in the same way that a friendly UK continues to recognise EU-27 issued licences.
Sorry, Jacko… The UK decided to leave the EU. There does seem to have been some expectation of special status simply by virtue of having been an EU member. But it doesn’t work that way.
As to “friendliness” or not – if that’s what you’re looking for – it is not difficult to find “unfriendly” behaviour by the UK. One example which is close to heart for me, being an academic, is that the UK withdrew from the Erasmus university student and teacher exchange programme. There was no need for the UK to do so but it did, expressly (according to Boris Johnson) to keep all those awful furriners out. Instead the UK has started its own programme – the Turing Scheme – which is only intended to help UK students study abroad – not the other way around.
In all, I still find the whole Brexit situation immensely sad and depressing. Pointing fingers will not make anything better.
I do believe that for many pro-Brexit business leaders the whole point was less regulation and less oversight.
I think that a more accurate characterisation is that business leaders hope that the UK will adopt more effective and efficient regulation.
The hypothesis that more regulation (and specifically more EU regulation) means more safety is clearly quite widely believed.
But, in the context of general aviation, does anyone have evidence which supports this hypothesis?
Can anyone show that, prior to the UK adopting EASA regulations, the British GA safety record was significantly worse than that of Germany or France or Belgium?
Taking two specific examples of different regulation, does anyone have evidence that allowing limited use of certified GA aeroplanes with a US BasicMed or UK Pilot Medical Declaration, or reversing EASA’s changes to Visual Flight Rules in Class D, correlates to worse overall GA fatality rates?
If the answer is “no”, then the hypothesis that safety can only be assured by a European Commission composed of failed, disgraced or drunken ex-politicians starts to look like the anti-vax heresy of some wacky cult.
As for flight crew licences, the suggestion that a European citizen who holds a UK-issued EASA PPL suddenly became unsafe to fly a French-registered Mousquetaire on 31 December 2020 is as shamefully absurd as confiscating truckers’ sandwiches.
