Tue Jul 29, 2014 11:07 am
#1302206
After 14 years of class ratings, there are still hobby pilots who have been through the process 7 or 8 times with one rating and still simply do not understand the rating and licence are different, and usually it is because they only have one of each. It is only when you have two or more ratings and one licence it becomes clearer.
I think the basic problem can be traced back to the JAA committee - deliberations for about 7 years on expenses and it seems none of them (or none of them with any influence on the committee) understood that private pilots are NOT all temporarily paused in their journey to the commercial flight deck via a modular route, so there was never any thought of actually explaining what was going on to the guy out in the field who was never going any further than flying his spamcan or historic aircraft.
Every "group A" hobby pilot who ONLY ever flew "group A" knew they needed a stamp every 13 months and that was 'it' so there was no real difference between the licence itself and adding a stamp, it was a simple system for simple flying, the licence and the stamp were integrated, to the pilots, it was just a licence which needed a stamp in the log book every 13 months, nothing else. Then JAA took that simple thing away and gave them something called a class rating to get signed in the licence every two years rather than a stamp in the log book, but no-one bothered to explain to them this was actually a sort of commercial-pilot concept pushed down to the lower levels and that some people actually had more than one rating. If you only have one rating yourself, and only ever had one rating, the fact that there is a difference between a licence and a rating simply never occurs to you, in the same way as previously the stamp was just 'part of the licence needing to be signed', the rating is just some page in a licence that needs to be signed, with no obvious difference.
Then they had another brilliant idea - make the licence only last 5 years and the simple rating only 2 years, just to expose the people who weren't following their thoughts.
I'm sure if I went back to the JAA committee of 1999 and said 'this 75 year old pilot who flies a Tiger Moth and has only ever flown a Tiger Moth doesn't understand difference between a licence and a rating as he only has one of each, so keeps confusing the two words', they would say 'well don't worry, it will all become much clearer to him when he gets an I/R and a commercial type rating and starts flying for an airline'.
Then being committee types, they were nerdishly interested in the difference between the words 'revalidation' and 'renewal', not realising no-one outside their committee was the least bit interested as it didn't really matter - everyone outside the committee had either a date that had expired or a date that had not expired, but either way, whatever it was called, they simply wanted to have another two years flying please.
Irv Lee - (R/T & Flight Examiner)
Deconfusion & Preflight Aide-Memoire:
http://tinyurl.com/pilotpalUK GA Twittering not Tw@ering: @irvleeuk