Sun Feb 22, 2015 12:19 pm
#1355226
Amen to that!
I look at Dave W's "How to keep your licence valid" thread and the excellent page he's developed, and weep. The US equivalent says "Do BFR with instructor. The end."
The EASA version is so complex that nobody understands it apart from Cookie, Irv and Nick - and the rules change often enough for them to need to go back and update regularly, or tell us to "wait for the new stuff that's coming, some day soon, date not determined".
I don't even know if I should be talking about "renewing", "revalidating", "reconfirming", "extending" or what when it's time to do something every year or two (but not one minute longer, or else!) to keep my licence or various bits "live". There are apparently similar words where you have to know the correct one to use in each case, or it all goes to rats.
Some bits tend to migrate to a different page in the licence, and need more faff to get them back into currency. I'm not sure what that does for air safety (which is the excuse we were given when EASA was invented and before it became the bureaucracy it now is). Clearly, Flying Instructors and Examiners are competent to judge a pilot's flying ability, but the bureaucracy is far too complex for them, so it all has to go back to EASA (or the CAA, the local EASA branch office) for ratification.
The hunter has lost sight of the rabbit, and is shooting everything in sight, just to be on the "safe" side. There are some sensible people in the CAA who must be frustrated beyond measure.
Why not dump the whole EASA bandwagon and palaver, and say "As of 1 Jan 2016, the FARs will apply and all the EASA stuff is obsolete"? Issue us with credit-card style licenses like the FAA ones, and get rid of the placcy wallets with A4 divided into micro-pages printed with microdots.