mh wrote:
You base your rants on erroneous understandings of Part M and Part ML
@mh I base my “rant” on what I see. As I said earlier, I would like an explanation from you if this include the end of the annual requirement for a authorized maintenance facility. A simple yes or no would do. If yes, that is of course great, and it would be nice with some references.
mh wrote:
You can directly measure the health of a club or flying society by the amount of such people around. Many grumpy old men and the absense of sensible people to set their rants straight correlate to missing young pilots and lead to dying airfields and clubs.
Exactly. In my club everyone is welcome. We have C-172s for the EASA crowd and PPL training (one full G1000 IFR and NVFR). We have a Cub for the tailwheel and “bush” crowd (including tail wheel instruction and short field courses). We have a Saab Safir for acro trianing and general “cool warbird like” flying. We have a microlight for training to microlight license. We will be starting building new hangar facilities next month for anyone to rent hangar space, microlight, experimental, EASA, it does not matter. It will even include a isolated and heated section, for anyone to maintain their aircraft during cold winters. And yes, we are are a grumpy and intolerant bunch of old men 
, the only thing we advocate is flying.
mh wrote:
We both don’t have evidence for any change of fractions of private, club or commercial ownership so please don’t make stuff up and present them as fact. It doesn’t stregnthen your position. And to obtain a 28:1 ratio there needed to be sold way above 28000 microlights or experimentals, which clearly is a myth. (Unless of course you again add some constraints to your remark…)
I really don’t understand what you are up to. What I presented are statistical numbers, nothing more. In Europe, according to GAMA, the sales of new SEPs were about 117 last year. Compare this with 2000-2500 microlights and up to 800 finished experimentals in Europe, and you will get the number 28:1. In the 60s and 70s, if the ratio of of about 16% of SEPs sold in Europe, this means that in those two decades there were sold about 2400 new SEPs each year in Europe. 2000-2400 microlights each year is no more than the sales of SEPs in the 60s and 70s. It’s just that the sales has plummeted from 2400 per year to 117 per year.
Silvaire wrote:
What I mean is exactly what I said, filing with government a schedule of maintenance actions that you mandatorily perform on your aircraft is a waste of effort, and a ridiculous intrusion into the maintenance of private property. If I had to do it, I wouldn’t own a plane. Maintenance on condition with a government mandated annual check of airworthiness has regardless proven to work fine.
Maybe I’m thick or something, but I just don’t get it. On my experimentals I have to make a maintainance “program” (a list of parts to oil and grease essentially). This “program” is to be approved by LT. They sign it, making it “official”. The reason is I can have made all kinds of counter intuitive changes. For instance I could have used wheel breaks using bicycle parts from a special vendor. I could have used a converted Mazda rotary engine with some ad hoc PSRU. The program is just a list, a recipee of things to do, list of things to check, list of things that must be replaced and what to measure to find out when to replace it. It is just a list of things to do, so a mechanic, or the next owner have a fighting chance of maintaining the aircraft. LT will never see the “program” again once they have signed it.
Sounds like a nice thing to do for the next owner LeSving, if there is one, but I see no reason for you to submit it to government for their blessing, or for a written document to be mandatory, or for your maintenance practice to remain intransigent after approval despite ongoing personal experience.
My aircraft maintenance practice is fluid, slightly anal 
and based on condition plus continuous personal involvement. Maintaining my personal plane is no different to me than maintaining a racing motorcycle or a hard working tractor, and how I do it technically is my own business as long as it can pass annual inspection – which I take seriously when it comes around every 13 months. I reluctantly accept the necessity for certificated A&Ps to sign my logbooks for routine maintenance only because in my case they are personal friends who are cooperative with me, and who I can & do repay for their weekend time in some way that they appreciate, directly. Running my life and in particular maintaining my property is not a joint venture with bureaucrats, a paid government-appointed so-called ‘club’ or anybody else.
BTW, you reminded me that the brakes on my dad’s Dragonfly (see other thread) were go-kart brakes. They were useless
Any more specific offers on what else EASA has done which is good or bad?
Silvaire wrote:
but I see no reason for you to submit it to government for their blessing, or for a written document to be mandatory, or for your maintenance practice to remain intransigent after approval despite ongoing personal experience.
It’s the law, simple as that. The law say that the owner/user of an aircraft is responsible for the airworthiness, and LT shall inspect that “all is OK”. If the user/owner finds things that shall be changed, he shall do that, and inform LT about it. The maintenance “program” is not intransigent (if I understand the word correct). LT writes regulations, but they cannot change the law.
@Peter please find a list on page 1 of this thread. That said, there is still much work to do like getting rid of CPL theory requirements for PPL-level instructors. Much more improvements have to be done by local CAAs, in Germany that would be getting rid of Flugleiter and Flugplatzzwang or allowing real IR flying in G, revoking the recent ban of powered aerobatics in controlled airspace or the increasing no-fly-zones because of collective boozing or political dirtytalk.
there is still much work to do like getting rid of CPL theory requirements for PPL-level instructors
Is that realistic, given that this was originally proposed by EASA years ago, and the training industry lobby killed it, apparently due to fears over making the instructor surplus even worse?
Most schools are pretty nervous about this, certainly according to the uk trade rags.
Is there an instructor surplus?
Historically, generally, yes. But the industry concerns were perhaps more to do with the already meagre instructor pay undermined by “low barrier to entry” newcomers who would work for even less.
I would like to see freelance instructors for all pilot papers…
Peter wrote:
Any more specific offers on what else EASA has done which is good or bad?
They take the role of projection screen for everything bad happening in European aviation, and by providing such a unified prime target, have united the European pilot population as could otherwise never have been achieved. Probably, even a pan-European site such as EuroGA might not exist in its current form without EASA.
Isn’t that really some achievement?
