LeSving wrote:
Maybe lots of Swedes were in EASA earlier, making it the way it was?
I give up discussing with you. It is completely unconstructive.
I have never been a fan of EASA but now having to get involved with the UK military airworthiness authorities I long for the simple and helpful EASA part M.
If UK military airworthiness was scrapped tomorrow and the whole thing run under civilian EASA 145 control the money saved would pay for atleaset another row squadrons of Typhoons.
LeSving wrote:
The last 20 years EASA has done nothing but to destroy GA.
Much too unreflected. And inaccurate in most things.
EASA has taken over where JAA started. Me personally,I would no longer be around had JAA not changed the way pilots licensing works. That alone has been something which I see as a huge advancement to what at least we had here, when after 7 years of inactivity, your licence was gone and you started afresh like if you had NO licence at all.
So the fact that licenses are now issued for life and the system of ratings which can be relatively easily revived after inactivity (safe the IR for the moment, which still requires full re-exam under certain conditions), this has brought back a lot of people who were forced out of GA for a while and found they can get their flying privileges back rather quickly.
Another thing which JAA/EASA has brought is the fact that you can fly in all of the EASA area with ONE license. I recently unearthed my Spanish convalidation of old and remember when you had to validate your national licenses for whereever you wanted to fly. That is a big step in the right direction as well.
Generally, EASA has done away with a lot of national gold plating (even though some countries still offer fierce resistance to this) and has the worthwile goal of standardizing aviation requirements and rules over Europe. Should it go the way it is intended, flying will be similar without national specialties e.t.c in all of EASA land one day. This will make things a lot easier for us, rather than having to read up and learn about national particuliarities all over the place.
Where EASA HAS done damage initially was when it applied commercial/airline like criteria to private airplanes as in the original part M and also in the initial licensing requirements which made out of relatively pedestrian licenses and ratings “doctorates”. Particularly the Part M requirements have driven cost sky high. But that is being corrected now, even though it does take time to implement. ELA1, ELA2 and now the new certification rules are VERY good news, so are the NPAs concerning flight training and other things, which appear to be on the horizon.
EASA came of to a very rocky and partially awful start, aided by the fact that quite a few national authorities used the chance of getting their pet fears cemented into law. Thankfully, under the new management, this is changing now. No, not all is well just yet, nor will it likely be in the future, but all in all, the general idea behind EASA and how it is coming out now is very valid indeed.
I have to admit that I also fell into the trap set by several national authorities claiming that all their ideological gold plating of certain (expensive) things were due to “Easa requirements” when this was not actually true. EASA has been misused in some cases in almost a fraudulent way to hammer through regulation they would not have gotten past their national interest groups and it took a long time for those groups to wake up to this fact. (I have to say that the same thing is true to a large extent within the EU as well, where EU law often gets misused or incorrectly blamed for the failings of national governments. This is also something I had to concede in recent years, particularly with the view to how the Brexit campaign was lead! but that is off topic, just the methods are quite similar).
Yes; very good summary above IMHO.
My perception is that EASA earned a lot more enemies than JAA ever did – simply due to the grotesquely arrogant behaviour of two individuals at the top of it (some of the stuff I saw at conferencies was sickening) coupled with their ability to push through measures using the Directive power of the EU (which JAA never had).
One could have a tangential discussion on what humbled EASA. IMHO it was the general humbling of the EU, which commenced with the Greek crisis and got “even better” later on as things started to collapse all over the place. That precipitated a lot of changes in attitude.
And personal perceptions tend to stick, which is why so many hate EASA, even today when their management has had a pretty big overhaul.
JAA had a limited ability to screw GA. They didn’t have a significant impact on the GA maintenance front, no real impact on the PPL licensing scene (apart from the 5 year license expiry which resulted in a large % of PPLs having no license at the 5 year point because no reminders were sent out 
) and while it pretty well killed the PPL/IR scene (the removal of the 700hr route, etc) this affected only a small number of people and the rest went N-reg / FAA PPL/IR.
EASA has a long way to go, due to vested financial interests at every step, and some needed stuff will never be possible in Europe due to its love affair with organisational approvals over individual approvals.
I just wish EASA would accept that flight training (and other things) didn’t have to all be part of an “organisation”. There’s already plenty of evidence from the United States that freelance instructing and freelance maintenance works well for private GA.
The LAA frequently tells us how they are trying to keep flying affordable, but there’s no point having affordable grass roots aviation if no one can afford to get trained in the first place because flight training has to be done in some stifling “organisation” which forces you to use their shagged C152 rather than your own Annex II aircraft.
In the UK, the training ‘organisation’ is still required; but you can can train on your own permit aircraft, which is a big step in the right direction!
https://www.caa.co.uk/News/CAA-extends-pilot-training-on-permit-aircraft/
Canuck wrote:
In the UK, the training ‘organisation’ is still required
And that’s the really big problem. There are probably not many FTOs that are happy for you to train in your own aircraft especially a Permit aircraft. If the organisation requirement were gone it would open up more flight training options that are entirely suitable for private GA.
Most FTOs won’t touch an aircraft owner even if it is certified.
And EASA or anybody else has no power to change this. Well, they could make the application process really trivial. When I did my IR conversion in 2011 via a (now defunct) Shoreham FTO, it was several hours of paperwork for them. But another FTO refused to do it even when I offered to pay them for their time.
It may be easier on the PPL scene though… but you need to find an instructor willing to sit in your plane 
This may be relevant
I used “my” aircraft (a rental on a non-equity scheme) with Rate One. They have a little article on their page about it.
http://www.rateoneaviation.com/aircraft/using-your-own-aircraft/
For the initial IR, I actually used theirs because I did in (late) winter and the home base has limited hours / no approach (so getting the plane back would have been annoying), and also because after a flight or two I found the TB20 somehow easier (especially setting up the glidepath, just putting gear down, instead of the slippery DA40 where I find setting a steady vertical speed much more difficult), but initially we had agreed using the DA40.
When I did my renewal with them in the DA40, it was also super easy.
Peter wrote:
Most FTOs won’t touch an aircraft owner even if it is certified.
There is a reason for that as every individual aircraft has to be covered by the paperwork which means processing by the NAA and payment of fees. This will (probably) change with the new Declared Training Organisations. Not only do they not need approval, but they need not declare every individual aircraft — only the aircraft types.
