These regulationary changes have already hit my flying income. I do very little mep work and in the past have tended to let the rating laspe. When some mep comes my way I renew by test and go and earn some money.
When I converted to an easa licence my mep rating had expired by 3 months so it was moved to the back of the licence.
Recently I got offered some mep time and I was unable to except it. Not only all this ato rubbish but also the fact the licence has to be sent back to the caa to have the rating putback on the ffront. More expense (with no proof of increased safety) and just as importantly a long and in this case too long time delay.
Things like this need to change its damaging my bottom line and the industry ad a whole
Peter you say the caa it test fee is reasonable. It simply is not. In Spain for instance its a 200 euro payment to the examiner.
It is a reasonable figure for charging out an educated person (i.e. somebody well above the NMW) from a company with the usual overheads.
If you can get a CAA examiner for a day for 200 quid then somebody is subsidising it (in this case the Spanish taxpayer i.e. the German taxpayer) which is great but morally it is a bit like the Royal Yacht Club demanding a taxpayer subsidy 
It is the principle of charging somebody out of a company which is wrong because it dramatically inflates costs for no safety benefit.
On another forum someone has posted that the reason the sheet has been pulled from the CAA web site is because PPL/IR have been in dialogue with the CAA as EASA are not saying an ATO is required for an ICAO conversion
I’m pretty sure about that.
Then why put it up in the first place?
The CAA don’t need some GA organisation to tell them what the EASA regs say. Also a huge amount of CAA stuff remains gold plated (relative to a straight reading of EASA regs) so why back down on this one item?
It might be that there is an individual in there who is writing stuff and putting it online, without proper supervision and checking.
Well yes but at least they are listening. Don’t we want them to accept and react to feedback? I know getting it right first is better but let’s keep our expectations modest for now.
At least 2 hours training was needed, I was told (without them even asking what experience I had).
Apologies for thread drift on the subject of MEP renewals.
Most corporate flight departments operating MEPs, or ME TP, would send their very current crews to Flight Safety, or similar, on a semi or annual basis – to ensure currency in ME – this applying to some equipment with auto feather and rudder boost. These refreshers are much more than two hours.
The point being that an MEP with its fibre glass nose, sometimes with a janitrol avgas fired heater in it, has nearly five to ten times the kinetic energy to dissipate of a typical four seat FG SEP, and not surprisingly over a five times higher fatality rate if involved in an actual accident.
I agree if you are not flying very regularly in an MEP you are correct in not bothering to renew the rating, but if you do decide to renew don’t short change yourself on the recurrent training.
An updated sheet is out now here
A local copy is here
Interesting stuff in there. No need for an ADF or a DME although if you don’t have them, you may end up with a different/longer route to a suitable airport with approaches that don’t need them.
Revolutionary stuff!
Interestingly the title of the document is “IR conversions PPLIR Europe” so it seems like PPL/IR are being very useful to us all! Well done them and the CAA for listening.
