Some recent threads made me wonder about this.
I can start the list:
For me, in North Scotland;
Much less restricted military Airspace.
Much more radar cover, including radar at EGPE Inverness, my homebase.
A new local airfield – Easter, with many new hangars.
Self-declared medical.
EASA brought much cheaper maintenance for the Jodel DR1050, which remained after Brexit.
ModeS, which is good, and 8.33 which is no advantage
Brexit, which is a nuisance.
Alcohol in auto petrol, which means I now use avgas.
Overall, things have improved .
@Peter the first point in your list is just wrong. C+I often turned a blind eye but that wasn’t always the case.
To me the main thing that has got better is the growth of Ultra Lights. We’ve just got to be wary of letting the regulators trying to make a leisure activity into CAT.
In some ways that also extends to the F-P categories.
The other big thing and here I would like to thank software people, is the choice of navigation and EFB software available; often free. Being free it means that for dinosaurs like me I get a chance to check it out in my own time. If I move on to something with more capability, that I need to pay for, I can do so at least with some confidence.
I would like to see greater acceptance by regulators that there are 2 distinct parts to aviation. One being those who fly for money (professionally it uses to be called) and those who fly for leisure (amateur that used to be called. This doesn’t preclude pilots who use their own aircraft for business transport ).
I would like regulators to accept that those in the second category fly very differently to the first and providing the pilot can do it and providing the equipment is aboard to allow them to do it they should not be limited to VFR day only even in kit built, plans built collection aircraft or even ULMs.
Especially with the abundance of very good EFB equipment available. I see no good reason why such equipment should need such things as STCs to be able to fit it to certified aircraft. If it works it works if it doesn’t it doesn’t.
I see no good reason these days why an aircraft has to be certified (go through a long winded and expensive certification process) to fly IFR. This should be left to the manufacturer. Yes you may need some quality or safety regulator but it didn’t do much in the case of Boeing.
I would like to ditch the Class2 medical. We have a shortage of doctors and an even bigger shortage of AME’s in some areas.
The class 2 has just got silly. Questions such as “are you or have you ever had suicidal thoughts”. If we must have AME’s let them act as doctors rather than finding things for them to test (thought up by some committee) which puts them at odds with other parts of the medical profession. The same questions come up every year. It’s a bit like having to pay for an asbestos report on your house every time you sell it or rent it to somebody new. Especially when the property was built after asbestos in residential buildings was outlawed. The same goes for the lead report. We need to go back at the very least to the way it was in the 1990’s as I have seen no evidence of an increase in accidents due to medical reasons, since then.
Finally I would like to see a European eGAR but quite how that would work, I don’t know.
the first point in your list is just wrong. C+I often turned a blind eye but that wasn’t always the case.
Glad you agree with me then 
On the wider topic, it is curious that actually little has changed.
The biggest thing is satnav, but apart from better integrated pan-European chart data, and thin tablets (which shut down frequently due to overheating!) it was around pretty much fully in 2000 when I started. I am sure all pilots doing European touring (I mean seriously; not the guy I met who flew France to Corfu with a Michelin road atlas) in 2000 used GPS 100%. Jepp did their “VFR/GPS” charts in 2000 for sure and you just needed a suitable tablet to run them; wasn’t something nice and thin like modern tablets but it was workable. Whether this was “workable” is more debatable but plenty of pilots flew with it, myself included all the way to Greece although sorting out the maps for Greece was hard work (ONC/TPC). But Greece was hard maps-wise until much more recently. I’d say satnav is much more accessible today to non-anoraks.
One of the original satnav leaders, Navbox, packed up in 2016.
Then this map copyright stupidity blocked the US satnav vendors (who had some good products, long before Europeans came up with some) supporting European airspaces.
Airspace and ATC practices have not changed substantially. A lot of details behind the scenes, only, AFAICS.
I didn’t list brexit because apart from collecting tons of passport stamps (my passport is going to fill up this year so I have to spend a day in London) the UK was never in schengen. So apart from the Germany+Italy immigration-PN concession (which almost nobody knew about anyway) little has changed.
OK; one more thing: the UK GAR form PN has changed from 4hrs before EOBT + 4hrs before UK arrival, to 2hrs before EOBT + 2hrs before EOBT, and this also applies to CH, NO, etc which was previously 24hrs. So a slight improvement.
Future stull belongs to a “wish list” thread
20 years is a relatively short. From my perspective in Switzerland:
Positive:
- Licenses don’t expire anymore, they are for life. To get back into flying is much easier than before. Thanks to EASA FCL. The big exception being the IR, which lapses finally after 7 years. But that is a rating, not a license.
- Flying within the Schengen area of the EU has become easier as there are no C + I required.
- GPS is a total game changer.
- The availability of computerized flight planning makes planning easier and less error prone.
- The available instrumentation and gadgets have made flying much easier too.
- One can fly any EASA registered airplane without any formality. (I still have my Spanish and German validations around somewhere…)
Negative:
- The worst is the loss of most larger airports to GA in my own area of interest, including my own homebase. When I started flying and up to say 10 years ago, it was still possible to access most international airports without any problems. That is history today.
- Airport slots and PPR was practically unheard of with very few exceptions.
- Airspace was less complex in the 1990ties.
- There were a lot H24 airports available in France and elsewhere.
- Fuel was a lot cheaper, availability was better.
- No compulsory handling anywhere.
- Navigation pre CFMU was much easier in the sense one could file an IFR flight plan with a couple of VOR’s and file and go. ATC would do the rest.
Myself, I found flying in the old days much more care free and easy going. But with the right attitude and flying to the right places, this is still the case if you know how. Also in a way, we may get too much information today, which may keep us from doing things we would simply have done without worrying about them. The “sum of all fears” effect of the Internet has made me a very much more cautious person today, not only in aviation.
gallois wrote:
I would like regulators to accept that those in the second category fly very differently to the first and providing the pilot can do it and providing the equipment is aboard to allow them to do it they should not be limited to VFR day only even in kit built, plans built collection aircraft or even ULMs.
Especially with the abundance of very good EFB equipment available. I see no good reason why such equipment should need such things as STCs to be able to fit it to certified aircraft. If it works it works if it doesn’t it doesn’t.
I fully agree. I also wish the distinction between certified and ULM and experimental would go away and be replaced by non-comercial, basically extend Part NCO to non-certified airplanes. You don’t need certificates to decide if you can fly IFR or not, all you need is equipment which allows you to do so. Same with night flying.
gallois wrote:
I see no good reason these days why an aircraft has to be certified (go through a long winded and expensive certification process) to fly IFR. This should be left to the manufacturer.
IMO it should depend on the Operation. NCO should be allowed to fly whatever it’s equipment allows.
gallois wrote:
I would like to ditch the Class2 medical.
Either that or introduce a Class 3 or Self Declaration for non-commercial ops and limited to 6 seats/2 tons. Fully agree with your line of argument.
This is future wishes – a different topic…
Maybe someone can start a thread on that.
btw
Navigation pre CFMU was much easier in the sense one could file an IFR flight plan with a couple of VOR’s and file and go. ATC would do the rest.
I think Eurocontrol / CFMU / IFPS is a lot older than 20 years. 30?
Don’t have 20 years experience, but during the last 10 years:
Good:
Estonian GA fleet has at least quadrupled. Probably the same for active pilots.
Part ML
LAPL
Lots of UL-s and experimentals
Bad:
Good airports have been closed (Malmi) , Spilve is not doing so great either,others like Split greatly increased fees.
lots of new military airspaces though they are pretty accomodating.
hopes for the future- Self Declaration , our ministry to finally approve the “on condition” TBO extension for NCO Rotaxes..
I think the most notable evolution in the last 20 years is the wide introduction of glass panel instruments, mobile device applications like moving map applications and weather apps.
The Garmin 1000 was introduced only in 2004 (that is – surprise! – just 20 years ago). Wikipedia
That in turn gives an easier access to the information necessary for flight conduction. Other glass instruments came up and filled market spots.
The decade before, that is more than 20 and up to 30 years ago, brought us more real technical changes. Gosh, even the Tecnam P92 that my parents use in the flight school is a design of 1992. They bought their first one still in the 90ies. That’s the decade when the microlights really came to life. That decade also brought GPS, that changed a lot more.
The last 20 years were, in comparison to that, comparatively calm. Some minor stuff, but nothing that brought really some big step. In several countries certified GA more or less died and microlights took it all over (more or less) like in Italy or Spain. But all around you see now lots of microlights and they’re totally accepted. Wasn’t alike 20 years ago.
We’re still waiting for a breakthrough of new engines. The big companies declared 20 years ago that they would bring some variety of Diesel engines. We don’t have them. 20 years ago there was another loud rumour about the end of AVGAS. We still have it.
Now actually some mini turbines are coming to life. We’ll see in 20 years whether this change(s/d) more…
But it does look like nothings changing a lot. Maybe the next 20 years will see more change to “our” hobby, there are some promising VTOL “drones” projects, maybe some get certified in the next 10 years. This might change access to flying, who knows.
I’m still amazed, year after year, how quite actual my 1970 Comanche still competes with actual designs and also in terms of maintenance. That tells a lot.
A comment about airspaces being more complex now. 20 years ago we were flying on GPS, but still mostly with raw data. So when flying VFR it was not as easy as nowadays to identify own position.
As this improved significantly, we can now tailor the airspaces to the needs of the airports. In fact at least here in Germany I see mostly airspace changes that make sense. To give an example, we even get a higher altitude for the control zone over Frankfurt, so that it is now again possible to do a sight seeing flight over Frankfurt, that was impossible for some years. Other than that by using a typical moving map system like Skydemon it is doable to avoid airspace structures. So yes, we have more to watch out, but we have much more powerful means to avoid the airspaces. To my eyes it’s getting easier over the years, honestly.
