Tue Oct 15, 2019 5:52 pm
#1725056
I watch the goings on at Blackbushe, sometimes at Popham, and then Redhill.
A Cessna landed on the grass, taxied in with its elevator flopping up and down, its somewhat deflated nose leg allowing the propeller to come precariously close to the sod.
I waited for the pilot to finish talking to his passenger, and when he was alone I went to have a kind word... I can’t ignore things even if I am not qualified wherever I happen to be.
The Cessna taxied out, at first the elevator was down... Then the pilot remembered, pulled back on the yoke, and the nose rose. The aeroplane taxied happily out, its propeller better protected, its nose leg a little more extended under less pressure.
Aviation safety is everybody’s business wherever you are. Always better to prevent an incident than rue the fact that you could have said something afterwards.
I think some places could use a bit of international input.
But wait a minute; my original training and first two thousand hours were all British, in a different time!
It would be nice to have the aviation experienced, aviation minded, and enthusiastic people the CAA once had.
I used to have their new engineering surveyors visit the hangar (1) at the top end of Redhill Aerodrome. ‘What have you got going on now Michael?’
‘The Jungmann is on permit renewal’, ‘Desmond is assembling his Sopwith Pup’, ‘I’m repairing and recovering TAU’. ‘This is how a scarf joint is done’.
Pull out the old BCAIPs... Still have them stored in Bracknell.
Wood, steel tube, fabric, piston engines, all this for the new surveyors often from BA, to learn and experience before going out to look at little aeroplanes for their CxA renewals.
This was a different time in the CAA’s history.
Is it as good now under EASA?
I don’t know, tell me.
I do know that you get two messages from FCL.
The inexperienced, ‘these are the regulations.’
And the CAA chap who more reasonably tells me I need to be assessed and a recommendation made by an instructor instructor.
I am all for having full control of how we conduct our own aviation business, at least until the World comes to a proper consensus in the way ICAO originally intended.
MichaelP
Wandering the World