tmo wrote:
You make it (making GA in Europe more like it is in the US) sound like a bad thing ;)
I had the impression JAA/EASA/NAA layers of law over the last decades in Europe were an attempt to “take back control” from FAA rules 
?
The less pragmatic pilot: I don’t want to follow (sensible) rules imposed by US FAA (unelected) bureaucrats, I would prefer (shi**y) rules that come from my own UK CAA (accountable) agents !
Of course there are pragmatic pilots…
tmo wrote:
You make it (making GA in Europe more like it is in the US) sound like a bad thing ;)
Sure I do!
Our entire glider scene would be killed. Our airline industry would be massively impacted (because we first need to find structures for European pilots to do hour building as in the US if we only allow people with ATPL in airline cockpits) and if flight training in flight clubs can survive needs to be thoroughly examined.
Not to mention smaller things like banning cost sharing flights, massively increased liabilities for FI,FE and AME (including need for massive liability protection insurance), etc.
And things that only affect us indirectly like higher hurdles for design and certification of new airplanes (just think about how many types have actually been developed in the EU recently as compared to the US) tiger hurdles to become certified as A&P, etc.
Don’t get me wrong: I like many of the rules in the US. I simply do not see how the FAA framework could work in our structure of the industry. And just picking the rules we like and not the whole package would be devastating to safety!
And just picking the rules we like and not the whole package would be devastating to safety!
Why? One should adopt regs which enhance safety, and drop the others.
Our entire glider scene would be killed
Why?
if flight training in flight clubs can survive needs to be thoroughly examined.
Why? The US allows totally freelance training, so implicitly allows a CFI to work for free, which is what one is doing in a “club” over here. Except not really; the student gets charged the market rate, while the FI gets paid little, perhaps while repaying the club’s earlier subsidy of the FI’s training… there is no free lunch; the money has to add up.
smaller things like banning cost sharing flights
The US does not ban cost shared flights – some reading around e.g. here – but instead has a climate which reflects the much greater GA activity over there, with far fewer “stupid restrictions”, which make flying A to B much less of an “institution” than it is here. People out there do cost share but there is far less pressure to do so.
In Europe, much GA is poor as a rat in a Baghdad sewer and a great % of pilots – especially renters, who are paying the highest possible marginal rate – will not do a flight at all unless they can cost share it, and cost share every single leg, so you get stunts like 3 people in a PA28 doing Shoreham – Lydd – Le Touquet – Shoreham, with a totally pointless stop at Lydd to swap the seating positions, so each of them ends up with a logbook entry. And at the end of all that, they sit in the Le T entrance eating home-made sandwiches because they don’t want to walk into the (very nice) town and spend €25 on a decent meal. In the US, the 3 would pile into the plane and just fly to Le T, and the other two would buy the pilot’s food and beer and nothing would be said 
Peter wrote:
Why? One should adopt regs which enhance safety, and drop the others.
Because safety is always the result of the combination of many rules. It is simply impossible to figure out wether an individual rule if implemented in a completely different legal framework will have a positive, neutral or negative effect on safety.
Just a simple example: It is simply impossible to tell how much of the (apparent) advantage of less strict regulation is compensated by a much stricter liability law that keeps people from doing stupid things. Peter wrote:
The example of microlight/UL is a good one to show that dramatic reduction in regulations could actually have devastating effects on safety – even though that leads to a significantly reduced price price and therefore theoretically should increase currency…
Our entire glider scene would be killed
Why?
Because CPL for glider instructors and for glider towing pilots is a very high hurdle …
Because safety is always the result of the combination of many rules. It is simply impossible to figure out wether an individual rule if implemented in a completely different legal framework will have a positive, neutral or negative effect on safety.
Just a simple example: It is simply impossible to tell how much of the (apparent) advantage of less strict regulation is compensated by a much stricter liability law that keeps people from doing stupid things
I don’t follow that at all.
Because CPL for glider instructors and for glider towing pilots is a very high hurdle …
That’s only because Europe has gold plated the CPL to separate the real men from the goats, by sitting 14 exams (~90% total crap), paying 80-100k for a CPL/IR… and all done to make it hard for “undesirable characters” to reach an airliner cockpit (a phrase actually used in the UK CAA staff examiner scene).
Even just the CPL is 13 exams. A roughly 1/3 reduction in work from the full CPL/IR 14-exam set and inappropriate for the exercise of commercial privileges in a non-IR environment.
One needs to be aware that in the US you can walk into a school (or into a freelance instructor’s wooden shed, etc) and do your PPL, IR, CPL, even SE ATP, all there, none of the blatent FTO trade protection stuff we have over here, which push so many into staying in hotels, walking around wearing the full Col Gaffadi outfit with gold braided epaulletes, while preventing many private owners getting an IR, etc.
I did my CPL exam (just 1 exam!) in Arizona for $90. No revision. The worst I could lose was the $90. I got a pass, simply using my general knowledge. Then a year later flew the checkride with a visiting DPE out of Elstree. Now I have a CPL for life. Just do a BFR every 2 years. And my IR is valid for ever too.
It’s a completely different scene. One cannot compare just the bits one wants to compare, to illustrate how terrible the US is
My instructor for my original FAA pilot certificate (and now for most of my flight reviews, free BTW) had his FAA Commercial, IR and CFI and was teaching students in his own plane at age 18.
About 12 years later with 2500 hrs of commercial flying under his belt he taught me to fly in my own plane and so the world kept turning under its own power.
Sometimes now he pokes at me saying “you should get your Commercial so you can pull banners after you quit working” The idea being that the CPL is an easy way to get another notch on your belt and have some fun.
There is a great thread currently on one of the US websites about a guy who just this year got his Private in his own Luscombe like me, in his case with an 82 year old CFI, but then unlike me set off on a loop around the entire western US at 90 kts, with all the valuable experiences that generates. Wish I’d done it back then. He visited tens of airports, flew legs at 10,000 feet over terrain and miles at 500 AGL. Landed once off airport in the desert just to do it. Had a manageable emergency and landed at a place catering mostly to large jets. Also and unrelated to flying he walked across the border and spent two nights in Mexico to save hotel money. Great reading and he is doubtless a proficient pilot now after his first year of cheap flying. Regulation and compliance with somebody else’s ideas or process wasn’t a big factor in doing it.
Here a story of a US PPL-IR becoming a CFI in two months (from making the decision to getting the ticket), while working a full time job, so that he could teach his daughter to fly
https://www.myrv10.com/N104CD/blog/20170119/index.html
Malibuflyer wrote:
Because safety is always the result of the combination of many rules
Safety as a result of the combination of many rules ? Safety is first and foremost in the head of the pilot, not in a combination of rules.
CPL requirement for glider instructors?
That’s only because Europe has gold plated the CPL to separate the real men from the goats,
Beat me to it! An FAA CPL is easy. In an ASEL it’s mildly painful because you have to learn to fly FAA-standard lazy-eights, which are a bit of a knack. But apart from that (and it only takes a few hours to get the hang of it), if you can’t pass an FAA CPL checkride at 500 hours, you should probably stick to stamp collecting. Ditto for the written – apart from having to know a bit about the Part 135 regs (flying for hire) there’s nothing harder than in the PPL written.
IMO the main emphasis of the CPL in Europe is based around such things a dealing with problem passengers or situations where commercial considerations have a role in the decision making process. The test is a VFR test flight in which diversions are high on the list as is dealing with things like the effects of turbulence on passengers. Maybe the CPL is different in the UK. Most here just add it on to the IR or CBIR. It doesn’t take much extra flying time AIUI.
