Employment | GAA

CVD: How the CAA seeks blind obedience to rules based on nothing at all

July 25, 2015

You don’t have a problem with colour vision, do you? So anything the CAA does to further restrict pilots affected by “colour vision deficiency isn’t your business, right? You might be wrong. OK, you can see in full-colour, but an accident of birth passed on by your partner (or further down the line) could see you with a son or grandson whose aviation career …

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 …

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 …

Sorry, folks, we lost. RRC rejects all complaints against CAA charges

February 27, 2014

Fellow aviators It is with a profound sense of disappointment that I convey the result of the Regulations Review Committee to my submission and those from AOPA, NZALPA, Aviation NZ and Mr Blair Boyle, regarding the CAA Fees, Charges and Levies. In essence, our submissions were unsuccessful and we have lost. We went into this battle knowing full well that we had a formidable …

2014 is the year General Aviation tells them exactly what we think of the CAA

December 27, 2013

We begin 2014 with the first in a series of online surveys to give users an opportunity to have their say on the issues that currently affect GA, and client relationships with the CAA. Our survey of CAA users is similar to what many commercial organisations do amongst their own client base to gain feedback so they can improve systems and service – and …

Pilot shortage? MoBIE tells Air New Zealand: We can’t see one

December 24, 2013

Air New Zealand’s application to have Aeroplane Pilot added to the Immediate Skills Shortage List has been rejected. This is an encouraging result for GAA, the New Zealand Airline Pilots Association and – most important of all – every Kiwi whose ambition is to fly for their national airline. GAA submitted a 17,000-word rebuttal of the airline’s claim (much of it written by students …

Category: Employment