Use this forum to flag up examples of red tape and gold plate
By riverrock
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1606514
We bought a new Black and White Laser Printer / Copier / Scanner for our club about 6 months ago.
I'm guessing we're going to have to throw it away, as our HofT doesn't own his own printer (or PC... we have recently trained him how to use an iPad).
What a waste of money.
We didn't buy a Colour one, as cheap colour lasers use coloured toner even when printing black and white (collecting the waste in toner bins), and since we had no reason to print in colour, inkjets tend to dry out becoming useless.
It will scan in colour - I guess we could scan the doc and the certification at the same time, and send in the stuff online but that would be painful too.
#1606693
BB wrote:Sent off my application to convert from lifetime PPL to EASA and got it bounced because the (correctly endorsed) ID was a monochrome not colour copy.
Perhaps I've had a sheltered life, but this is a bit of unheralded news to me.

Leaving aside the need for sending the CAA copies of documents issued by themselves and the curious lack of confidence in their own system not regarding an existing licence as adequate to cover any required ID, it seems they are doing their level best to be obstructive as it was also rejected on the grounds I don't have an English qualification (I do) and that the (again correctly endorsed) medical wasn't clear enough....

Is this normal service or have I simply found the CAA staff on a day when they had particularly little to occupy the long empty hours?


I'd suggest pointing them at this, which is the guidance page for GA, and makes no mention of colour...

Then ask them to point out to you where it specifies colour in the SRG1104 form Guidance Note 1 or the accompanying web page (thanks @Dave W) or anywhere else, apart from a Commercial part of their website.

I'd be livid.
User avatar
By flybymike
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1606696
Well spotted on the difference between Commercial and GA! (Although surely some of GA is commercial?)
I can’t remember the precise CAA web page link route I took in order to end up at the “commercial colour” page, but in any event, judging from folks experience on here, it looks academic, since they they still seem to require colour copies for GA regardless. Doubtless they just haven’t updated the GA form or even more likely haven’t twigged that they have two forms which say different things.
Last edited by flybymike on Mon Apr 23, 2018 11:57 pm, edited 1 time in total.
User avatar
By Irv Lee
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1606697
I am trying to catch up with announcements having been away. Has there been any announcement with warning on this? It seems pretty odd that after years of accepting b/w copies, suddenly to take a particular applicant and decide that him/her and everyone afterwards will have their achievement that they have spent possibly over a year and possibly nearly a five figure sum working towards effectively knocked back by this without (as far as I can find yet) any caa announcement to schools. I had originally only thought of "audit fears" as an explanation (when is the easa audit... this or next month perhaps?), but away from audit fears, it might even be something I have seen before in corporates and Govt, the old "change that graph somehow by next month, don't care how" game. if you reject almost every application and make it look like the applicant is at fault, that could do wonders for the right weekly or monthly internal measurement graph presented to the higher levels. That is only musing over possibilities, but something must have triggered this, if it were French it would be new boss in the house wanting to show he/she had arrived, but it is not clear at all why this has sprung up. Perhaps this new parliamentary committee could find out if we can't. Anyone here on it?
Last edited by Irv Lee on Tue Apr 24, 2018 12:13 am, edited 1 time in total.
#1606700
flybymike wrote:Well spotted on the difference between Commercial and GA! (Although surely some of GA is commercial?)
I can’t remember the precise CAA web page link route I took in order to end up at the “commercial colour” page, but in any event, judging from folks experience on here, it looks academic, since they they still seem to require colour copies for GA regardless. Doubtless they just haven’t updated the GA form or even more likely haven’t twigged that they have two forms which say different things.


Agreed they "seem to require colour copies for GA" ... hence my suggestion to ask them to show you where it requires this. If it is not a requirement, you do not have to do it, by definition. I am livid on behalf of the OP.
User avatar
By Irv Lee
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1606707
@flybymike but if you have a choice between "send a colour photo copy" and "your hard work towards your dream, your year plus and a high four figure sum spent ends here with nothing", what do you do? Something triggered this. What was it?
User avatar
By flybymike
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1606708
Well I must admit that colour copies is quite a common requirement for ID stuff generally (I’ve had to supply them to open savings accounts and for money laundering regs etc) so I expect someone at the CAA has recently latched onto this and just decided to join the party!

It is of course a pointless PITA for all those who get sent around the houses as a result. :roll:
User avatar
By Irv Lee
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1606723
@flybymike but my point is about fairness in treatment of people, not particularly about what the CAA want or need. If you have what people think is a stupid/pointless step to a process, there is a huge difference in terms of perceived arrogance, unfair treatment and contempt for individuals between
(A) telling them in advance
compared to
(B) the process being letting them apply into what is seen as an unnecessarily long duration pipeline anyway and then reject the application as the way of informing them about it.
In this case, (B) is worse, as it is informing them by rejection of a SUDDEN CHANGE to a long established and apparently stable process rather than one of those "from a date in 3 months time..." declarations. That it what makes it smell of either "audit fear" or "change that graph by next month" within a large organisation, and why it might be worth the new parliamentary group digging into not only who threw the switch but what motivated it so suddenly, as the apparently simple concept of using colour for copies might be a first indicator of a deeper cancer that needs cutting out.
For example, you always had to send a copy of your medical to the people (the CAA) who hold your medical when you applied for a conversion to an EASA licence via paper forms. I would GUESS that this was because the people processing it were not allowed the right to access the medical systems, so if that guess is correct, there was method in what appeared to be process madness but the BIG difference there though was the applicant was TOLD what to send, not informed by rejection.
Dave W, flybymike liked this
By cockney steve
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1606767
Most respondents to this thread were under the impression that monochrome was acceptable. It took somebody with time, patience and luck to establish that, by implication, it is enshrined in the regs, IE there is no written requirement in the GA rule, but a definitive "colour" requirement in the Commercial section.

I'd venture to suggest it may be a new and zealous operative who has an incomplete grasp of the complexities of the regulations, who has started to process these applications. I'd suggest a strongly -worded complaint to the "top-dog" should cascade down through the remains of the "system" and the appropriate retraining and realignment of expectations restored to the order of things. (if the guilty operative had only processed Commercial applications before, they may have thought that, logically, the same requirements would apply to Private Aviation..

Again, how many actual pilots on here, accepted that the regs were either long-standing requirement for colour that had never been enforced, or a sudden, unannounced change.
ISTR there was a recent thread complaining that CAA was stating that extensive retraining was needed for a simple licence conversion, whereas the truth was, simple , vastly quicker and cheaper paperwork exercise.

They don't know their own regs, so don't ascribe to malice that which can be laid at the door of incompetence. (unless they are on a revenue- raising drive and are deliberately milking the cow) :twisted:


but, they wouldn't do that, would they? :roll:
#1606773
Irv Lee wrote: That it what makes it smell of either "audit fear" or "change that graph by next month" within a large organisation, and why it might be worth the new parliamentary group digging into not only who threw the switch but what motivated it so suddenly, as the apparently simple concept of using colour for copies might be a first indicator of a deeper cancer that needs cutting out.


Irv, you must have more contact with the CAA than many. Don’t you think this is a result of a systematic re-structuring of the CAA to reduce costs?
User avatar
By Irv Lee
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1607045
@Bob Upanddown i only see/hear what you see/hear, as I had to walk away last year when I felt things were not as they should be on the infringement side, yet complaining to management about specifics didn't lead anywhere good, (which of course might itself be a symptom of swamping workload at management levels too).
There are various views about what causes CAA problems generally, some suggest higher management polices, others that it is localised roles having to cope in overworked, underfunded and/or under trained areas, experienced people leaving, but it might be a mix of all those, but in this "copies-gate", I can only say the symptoms remind me of the two suggestions I made, which come from observations of other large organisations over decades. (I did a search for a calendar of when NAA audits are, but nothing found, shame, we might know when to expect screws being turned if there is a link at all!)
However let us not forget to thank whoever in the CAA is investing time and budget there on working on things like "self declare medicals" for easa licences, or national licence in easa aircraft extension etc.
Dave W, flybymike, kanga liked this