Costs | GAA - Page 4

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 …

The real enemy of aviation is not the CAA. It is the Treasury

August 17, 2014

I attended the CAA meeting in Palmerston North on the Funding Framework for 2015 to 2018, after travelling from Hastings. Initially, I was not terribly interested because, as many will know, CAA has cost me an enormous amount of wasted hours over the last few years, and I saw this as probably some more wasted time. Like everyone else, my feeling was “What is …

AvKiwi seminars, with free booze? No problem. Same schedule to discuss charges? Too expensive, says the CAA

July 12, 2014

Most of New Zealand’s aviators will know that the CAA is embarking on a review of its fees and charges. It must do this because the CAA is committed to three-yearly reviews of fees and charges after admitting that it lost the plot for 15 years and neglected to review its costs until 2010. This led to the most draconian increases – and some …

House of Representatives votes to ban aviation user charges and nav chart fees

June 21, 2014

Are you sitting down? Good. We don’t want you fainting from shock. The bad news is that it’s not our House of Representatives, but the one in the United States, which leads the world in aviation. (Our House of Representatives merely rubber-stamps legislation to increase GA costs and damage the sector.) The US House of Representatives has voted to provide $15.7 billion to the …

Category: Costs