Peter as a long standing citizen of this sceptred realm you might have picked up on c**k up, trumps conspiracy as a philosophy – or for those hankering after science, the second law of thermodynamics.
I just had a long discussion on a FB group on this subject.
From what I gather, the average private pilot is not to be trusted with carrying anyone from the general public. Air transport is the business of AOC holders and professional pilots that have invested 10s of k€ to get their licenses and ratings, and they are the only one capable of upholding the safety standards which are expected from air transport.
The fact that cost sharing is not air transport, and that the cost sharing web sites are obligated to explain that is apparently totally irrelevant to the opponents.
The suggestion to require a minimum total and recent experience from the pilots offering flights on those sites, is not good enough. Actually, nothing short of an AOC is good enough.
I do not believe for one second that cost sharing will cut into the market for air taxi.
Clothes don’t make the man, and the license (or rating) does not make the pilot. There are plenty of examples of bad CPL holders out there. There are also plenty of bad FIs. Going through the BEA database, I find plenty of FIs running out of gas, CPL getting lost after some dubious flight preparation (he looked at an outdated weather), incapable of using the VOR or GPS and almost running out of fuel, an aerial photographer running out of fuel…
If the PPLs are bad, isn’t that also the fault of the FIs that revalidate their ratings? If those guys are dangerous, wouldn’t they need additional training to meet the standards?
Single pilot operations cannot be compared to multi pilot operations either. Pilots in most air transport have the benedit if having a senior pilot in the left seat to learn the ropes from.
Those guys are killing a “market” that would not otherwise exist.
Unlike the US BFR system, you only need an hour with an FI to revalidate a PPL, and an examiner to sign the log book. There is no test standard and you could just do some sightseeing and re land.
I agree there is no commercial risk to existing A to B AOC, which mainly fly turbine equipment, but the AOC crew do undertake OPC and LPC flights on a regular basis.
In the US Part 135 does have a safety edge, but it is closer to Part 91 than Part 121.
This consigne opérationnelle is to me an excès de pouvoir (an ultra vires act).I wonder if someone will spend the money to challenge its validity in court.
The consigne says that all flights must be VFR by day.
For A to B flights, the pilot must have either a CPL, or a PPL/IR or an instructor rating.
The plane must be night VFR equipped.
Obviously the idea is to make sure that the pilot can get out an inadvertent loss of external references safely
Problem is that
a) Most people in CAT do not and/or do not want to understand GA and the necessities, albeit GA is the very basis of their aviation as a whole. Cutting down GA will hurt CAT in the long run.
b) Most politicians do not and/or do not want to understand GA. Plus, there is no gain for them in engaging in GA.
c) These platforms should open to the AOC holders and take them aboard, especially those who would have a potential competition in private flights. The general public could chose the one over the other with transparency of possibilities and safety concerns.
d) If the platforms do not take care, it is easy for some people to make the case for a complete ban on flight cost sharing.
e) Competence as a pilot and safety of the flight at hand is neither related to the license, nor to the hours flown. Experience can help, but you must be able and willing to utilise it.
Piotr_Szut wrote:
Obviously the idea is to make sure that the pilot can get out an inadvertent loss of external references safely
No. The idea is to narrow down the number of qualifying pilots so much that it pulls the rug under the cost sharing sites.
There are plenty of examples of bad CPL holders out there. There are also plenty of bad FIs. Going through the BEA database, I find plenty of FIs running out of gas, CPL getting lost after some dubious flight preparation (he looked at an outdated weather), incapable of using the VOR or GPS and almost running out of fuel,
You are right. Most of the accidents are due to a pilot who either willingly broke the rules, or tried to do something beyond his abilities.
It’s not the lack of knowledge or experience which is dangerous, it’s the willingness to try to do something beyond your abilities.
If the PPLs are bad, isn’t that also the fault of the FIs that revalidate their ratings? If those guys are dangerous, wouldn’t they need additional training to meet the standards?
In EASA the SEP rating is revalidated by right, whether the FI wants it or not, if the training and experience requirements are met, but this is not the point. Most of the pilots involved in GA accidents would have probably shown decent flying standards. Most accidents are due to poor decision making, and decision making ability cannot be adequately evaluated by an instructor, and cannot be evaluated at all by a client of a cost sharing platform.
The client has no way to evaluate the risk he takes. The cost sharing platforms say that the passengers will evaluate the pilot, but how can they? How can you evaluate that a pilot took dangerous decisions if you know nothing about aviation?
It has often been sad that an FI doing the one-hour training flight can (or is supposed to) refuse signing the revalidation of he is not satisfied with the performance of the pilot, but indeed, there doesn’t seem to be a regulation saying so.
The regulation doesn’t say (unless that recently changed, which I remember vaguely) that this had to be a special flight with some defined content. I get a signature after each flight with an instructor just as a routine. When it is time to revalidate my SEP, I usually find one flight that took at least an hour and that ticks the box. I have never gone up with an instructor just for the purpose of “SEP revalidation”.
The arguments about decision making being the most critical are pretty on key, in my opinion.
Pilot incompetence may lead to minor incidents (e.g. rough landings, forced landings, and near-misses), but the emotional and mental state of an individual plays a much larger role in incidents, and proof can be found in the form of a commercial jet being voluntarily flown into a mountain with scores of people onboard…
I wonder what the passenger casualty statistics are for GA compared to Commercial operations…?
Surely that incident, plus the Egypt crash in the Med last year, along with a few others puts the number higher for Commercial than GA, no?
