Looks like 8 in the last reported 12 month period.
But the CAA lists only cases they won.
To form an opinion on whether the number is OK one needs to read the listings. IMHO the CAA prosecutes only the most blatent cases. I once had a conversation with their Head of Prosecutions and he went into some detail.
But the CAA lists only cases they won.
Many of those are businesses pleading guilty to charges which it is not commercially viable for them to contest. One can winkle out a bit more detail with a Freedom of Information request. The UK CAA doesn’t advertise the fact, but last time I checked the Authority had lost roughly 70% of defended/contested charges.
The office of the UK CAA General Counsel does some hilarious things, like fielding a CAA staffer as an expert witness who claimed under oath that he “could not remember” wherther he had been advised of the provisions of Part 19 of the Criminal Procedure Rules… That sort of prosecutorial porkie tends to make a judge stop the trial so he can get some fresh air on a golf course. 
JasonC wrote:
Ok, so you agree there is a standard which could incur criminal sanctions.I think it is unarguable to suggest anything other than that “normal” mistakes by a pilot should not be aggressively pursued by regulators lest that creates an atmosphere of coverup and prevents safety improvements being made.
At least in Norway, no information given to the aviation authorities or investigation authority can be used as evidence in a civil or criminal case. The accident report can be used however, because it’s official. In any case, it’s not the aviation authority that eventually prosecutes, it’s the police, and it’s done completely independent from any of the other authorities. Whenever there is a death or serious injury, the police shall investigate (on their own), and if they find it likely that some laws are broken, they will prosecute, they have to according to the law.There have been instances where way too eager and hopelessly ignorant local police have prosecuted pilots, got hem convicted in the local court, only to loose in the appeal court when the proper accident report from the investigation bureau came out.
I think it is unarguable to suggest anything other than that “normal” mistakes by a pilot should not be aggressively pursued by regulators lest that creates an atmosphere of coverup and prevents safety improvements being made.
How do you distinguish between normal and abnormal mistakes though? Consequences. Form? If display pilots are killing themselves every 400 hours, is that frequently enough to mean such mistakes should be defined as ‘normal’? Misreading an altimeter, or misunderstanding what it means might be a culpable mistake if you’re in the FISO’s office, but easy to do if you’re inverted pulling 3gs on a turbulent day. I simply don’t know. Most errors seem banal when viewed through a retrospectoscope.
Many of those are businesses pleading guilty to charges which it is not commercially viable for them to contest.
I don’t know if this is current practice but the CAA used to offer you a deal whereby if you plead Guilty they would go for much smaller costs. For example if you plead G they would go for 1k but if you plead NG and lose they will go for 5k. Obviously, this is an incentive to plead G regardless of what one feels about it. And to most light GA pilots 5k is a lot more than 1k…
the Authority had lost roughly 70% of defended/contested charges.
That’s really interesting. Looking at the ones they won, they seem well justified. I wonder which ones they lose? There is no central record is there? They pop up in the local papers for the town.
Misreading an altimeter
I don’t think this guy misread his altimeter…
JasonC wrote:
If a train driver makes a mistake and ignores a speed limit on a bend and 50 people die, the criminal courts should have no involvement?
The point is that people will always make mistakes. It’s human nature and can’t in itself reasonably be criminal. That’s why we set up systems that to deal with human mistakes, either by making them happen more seldom or mitigating the consequences, or both.
If a train driver ignores the speed limit by mistake, then it’s a systems failure and should be treated as such. The question law enforcement should ask is: Has the system been set up in the best reasonable way to deal with human mistakes?
Silvaire wrote:
Remind me if necessary not to fly as PIC in the UK. I think that’s a huge number per year for a tiny geographic area.
If you don’t do illegal public transport then you’re probably perfectly safe acting as PIC in the UK. No need to be so paranoid about it.
Airborne_Again wrote:
Has the system been set up in the best reasonable way to deal with human mistakes?
Which is why the spectre of manslaughter prosecution should hang over the head of senior and middle management, as well as regulators and corporate entities.
JasonC wrote:
If a train driver makes a mistake and ignores a speed limit on a bend and 50 people die, the criminal courts should have no involvement?
In the case that it was not premeditated? No. Prosecuting the driver is just a pointless act of revenge for human error. The train driver will live with the guilt for the rest of their lives; they will certainly never work on the railways again. What good would locking the train driver be? What good would fining him be? Fining him will probably hurt his innocent family more than him. He’s not a danger to society, prison would serve zero purpose. It’s not like someone who (for example) wilfully drink drives, gets in their car, deliberately drives 30 mph over the speed limit and T-bones someone at an intersection. That’s premeditated, and a spell away from society to reflect on it may serve a purpose and go on to protect society.
A case in point is the curve at Morpeth, every decade or two a train goes through there at double the speed limit, the driver gets slung in jail but the train company gets no more than a stern finger wagging. Perhaps if it were the other way around – the executives of the train company that decided not to spend the money on adequate protection measures for the curve were prosecuted, then perhaps that section of line would have ATP and trains hurtling off into the housing estate below would have stopped happening by the 1980s.
Similarly in the Spanish train crash in northern Spain a couple of years ago (very similar to the Morpeth curve) – what good would slinging the driver in jail do? It wasn’t premeditated, he was distracted by making a radio call to the base and made a mistake about his position, not realising until it was too late that he was very close to the curve at high speed. Had the train company put a beacon in the track on the approach to the curve it may never have happened.
If you don’t do illegal public transport then you’re probably perfectly safe acting as PIC in the UK
plus
There have been other prosecutions for lesser stuff (eg somebody doing low pass on a lake in Scotland) but they failed.
