Costs | GAA - Page 4

Medicals: CAA rewrites history, but they’re still way behind the times

December 17, 2015

Authoritarian regimes have a bad habit of rewriting history. The CAA’s shameless U-turn over the medical certification fee is a classic example. When we presented the GAA case against increases in fees and charges to the Regulations Review Committee in March 2013, we submitted that the CAA was viewing the medical certification fee only as a “private good” and therefore the costs were to …

Announcing the GAA’s alliance with the NZAIG

October 20, 2015

Des Lines and Brian Mackie, who manage the GAA social network on behalf of you and more than 1500 other supporters, have agreed to work in alliance with the New Zealand Aviation Industry Group. This cooperation is intended to better address issues that affect professional and private participants in the New Zealand general aviation system. Both groups will maintain their freedom of independent action, …

Could this signal the beginning of the end for PPL medicals?

June 8, 2015

The UK CAA is considering the removal of PPL medicals – and our CAA is keeping a close watch. The UK authority has worked with a number of aviation medical experts to develop a consultation on medical requirements for some private pilots which aims to make them more realistic and reduce bureaucracy. (No changes are proposed for pilots with commercial licences.) It proposes that …

MetFlight GA is free again: Let’s celebrate one step backwards to safer flying

May 26, 2015

From July 1, MetFlight GA will be publicly funded – just like mountain and marine forecasts. This decision, buried in the 2015 Budget, brings to an end a campaign of protest from private pilots, established aviation organisations and GAA supporters. It finally acknowledges that weather information for general aviators is for the benefit of people aloft and people on the ground, and must never …

Cash for questions: A New Zealand version, operated by the CAA

March 2, 2015

The Civil Aviation Authority of New Zealand and the Ministry of Transport are dysfunctional. This article offers supporting evidence. On 15 October 2010, Martin Jenkins – a New Zealand-based consulting firm providing strategic management support to clients in the public, private and not-for-profit sectors – received instructions from the CAA. They were engaged to prepare a Value for Money report on the CAA’s performance …

The Ministry of Transport can hardly move a muscle. Here is some evidence

February 14, 2015

Following the last election, and the long overdue departure of Gerry Brownlee as Minister of Transport (arguably the CAA’s least competent overlord in living memory) to his new role in protecting our great nation as Minister of Defence, we must now work with two new faces: Simon Bridges as Minister of Transport and Tukituki National MP Craig Foss, Associate Minister of Transport, responsible for …

CAAs are not all made the same…

January 13, 2015

Significant progress was made in 2014 to make regulation of the UK’s General Aviation sector more proportionate and evidence-based, says the UK Civil Aviation Authority. It launched a new General Aviation Unit on 1 April 2014. UK CAA says the unit is the latest demonstration of its determination to being a better regulator, reducing and improving its regulation of this key part of aviation …

CAA funding and the fuel levy: It ticks all the boxes except the one marked ‘Too hard’

December 2, 2014

Based “on information to hand, the CAA Board does not support the introduction of a fuel levy”. This is the hidden headline in the CAA’s summary of feedback to its Stage 1 consultation. Hidden, in fact, on the final page of its document. In one throwaway line. Yet this was the most significant and most widely supported suggestion made by respondents to Stage 1 …

The CAA funding review, Stage 1 – or was it Faze 1?

November 25, 2014

When two opposing mindsets approach collision, they may mirror the laws of magnetism; the closer they get, the more strongly they’ll repel one another. We are talking about – on the one hand – pen-pushing and bean-counting bureaucrats who do not fly but instead toil and fret beneath leaden Wellington skies and – on the other – free-thinking aviators who rejoice in loosing the …

User Pays and the Law of Diminishing Returns. The more we pay, the less we fly

October 6, 2014

I have never been a great fan of Government bureaucracy, especially when it is being funded by my hard-earned tax dollars. We all expect value for money and never complain when we see that the service received from government departments has improved, or that our taxation dollars are being well spent. But now I think our tolerance of the Government’s “user pays” ideology has …

Category: Costs