Postby Timothy Huff » February 18th, 2020, 10:37 am
The price will be put up, "reluctantly" (read "foreseeably"). As I understand it, the CAA are mandated by Act of Parliament to recover all their costs in administering Civil Aviation. In practice this tends to mean, as well as paying for their gold-plated pensions, those at the bottom of the aviation food-chain, eg Private Pilots, (and below them, us!) pay rather more than large Airlines, who have the clout to "negotiate" better deals for rates. (and even those are pretty eye-watering)
They do do very good work, especially in Aviation Safety, and I'm sure they are genuinely all 'models of rectitude', but the system itself is utterly indefensible, as Parliament doesn't give a damn if they're not being asked to pay for it, and there's really no body examining whether the scales of charges represent value-for-money for actual costs incurred. As essentially the same body that decides the costs, also implements the scale of charges, without meaningful peer-review, beyond airlines complaining periodically, one can readily see the systemic problem.
In fairness to the CAA, they're not the only actor here, so to some extent they're being impelled to design and implement something, which had the decision been entirely theirs - as opposed to the DoT's - might never have seen the light of day.
The best thing we could have done, as a hobby, would have been to refuse, point-blank, to comply, and raise such a protracted series of (lawful) nuisances to them that the scheme is dropped, or at least the non-drone part of it. If it had been a one-off "license charge", I think that might have worked - afterall we most of us do the same for a driving license - it's the recurrent charge in association with the CAA's requirement to cover costs incurred that's the "gotcha".
Last edited by
Timothy Huff on February 18th, 2020, 2:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.
