Peter wrote:
Removing renting privileges is pure punishment and thus inappropriate.
I have to agree – that is cruel and unusual. The club is actually prohibiting you from being current. It is nonsensical. Mandatory training, sure; prohibition on long-distance rentals for a period of time, not so much, but a total prohibition is nonsense. They are actually endangering you.
This appears even more odd to me, since the authorities obviously decided not to punish Sebastian, although they’d have well been able to, as he must have flown through IMC in the area of Brussels Int.. I think ATC was busy to keep the other traffic well clear while expecting Sebastian to mess it all up in this emergency. After such inappropriate punishment I’d leave this club anyway. And I agree with Peter. Kudos to Sebastian for making such a fantastic trip alone VFR in winter which is for many PPLs a once in a lifetime. Sebastian, as I see it, you did the aftermath thoroughly with a respectful attitude, learn from it and enjoy flying (I’m relieved, you obviously do!).
Indeed, they are robbing you of the chance to learn from your mistakes. That said, if it was my plane I was picking up in Antwerp, I’m not sure if I would be renting it out again anytime soon (to anyone for that matter…).
Just get on with it and few lessons learned, go rent elsewhere and maybe good luck getting into a syndicate or buying your own aircraft, on the club rules:
- Flying with no remaining hours: I would simply not do that, it invalidate load of stuff but you got an extension?
- Continue after runway excursion: again we are talking Robin on grass not B737, whatever people would say on this, you are the only guy present and the only one to be able to judge, I would have done the same put a note on the tech log and fly the aircraft back anyway (many people do sing a lot on these mid-shapes but at the end of the day few will come to collect the aircraft and you will have to fly it back 
)
- VFR-in-IMC Weather: that is really your problem and we all learned from that 
even with IR flying in IMC on occasional rental aircraft is always tricky (better have your key set you will never have the time to get used to the “aircraft, avionics, trip”)
As long as they can get the aircraft back airworthy without loss of income, you I only have yourself to deal with !
Bobo – on the flip side, if you have already decided to rent it out, you’d probably be happy at the outcome, given the possible ways this could have gone. IOW, I’d fly with the guy!
tmo wrote:
Bobo – on the flip side, if you have already decided to rent it out, you’d probably be happy at the outcome…
No argument there!
tmo wrote:
Peter wrote: Removing renting privileges is pure punishment and thus inappropriate.I have to agree – that is cruel and unusual. The club is actually prohibiting you from being current. It is nonsensical. Mandatory training, sure; prohibition on long-distance rentals for a period of time, not so much, but a total prohibition is nonsense. They are actually endangering you.
Try looking at the situation from the club’s perspective: There’s a newly-minted PPL who is outside the normal club profile (going within two months through practical training where others take at least a year or two), wants to do a lot of things already from the start (I booked myself an aerobatic lesson as sixth flight; first non-circuit trip for overland navigation was initially planned with destinations outside the Netherlands, etc.), and I did get – after I booked an hour in the PA28 to see if I would get on with familiarisation there – an admonishment (in a positive sense) from one of my instructors that I was trying to run before I learned to walk and needed to slow a bit down and get more experience. And then this guy with only about 50h PIC time takes off for a very untypical long-distance trip in the winter, gets into trouble on multiple fronts, and it shows that due to lack of experience the decisionmaking process was breaking down.
I assume that the whole situation might normalise once I go flying with my own shared plane more, show that I won’t make the same mistakes again, and tap more into the experience of the other club members and instructors instead of running off on my own. It’s about them trusting me again.
I did try to look from a club perspective, that is why I said “mandate more training” and possibly keep you closer to home for some time. Forbidding you from flying at all is actually counterproductive, as you will be less current and at the same time more hungry to fly.
Peter wrote:
And the only reason the majority of the other PPLs have not made the same bad decisions is because they would not dare to even try. Why don’t they try? Several reasons, the main one being training inadequate for the privileges of the licence!
On the flip side, look at the situation here for almost all of my colleagues (decent technical job, money’s quite OK) who fly: I know of one who owns a share in a SR22, me with the share in the RV-7, and everyone else is a club member at one of the Dutch airfields in the vicinity and rents. And also, most have families, etc., so something like last Thursday when I blew a few hundred Euros on a coffee somewhere in northern Germany is difficult to justify for them. So due to time constraints, budget discussion, etc., they are happy with doing smaller trips or a half day every now and then. Different levels of ambition.
Ibra wrote:
Continue after runway excursion: again we are talking Robin on grass not B737, whatever people would say on this, you are the only guy present and the only one to be able to judge, I would have done the same put a note on the tech log and fly the aircraft back anyway (many people do sing a lot on these mid-shapes but at the end of the day few will come to collect the aircraft and you will have to fly it back )
We’re talking about an aircraft which is perfectly happy on a grass runway. As long as I made sure I didn’t hit anything, I wouldn’t care in the least about an excursion onto the grass as far as airworthiness is concerned. There are other concern, of course.
