For as long as I can remember, flying has been a great deal easier and cheaper in the United States than it has been in England or anywhere else in Europe. Over here, high fuel prices, poor flying weather, and the rules of petty officialdom have conspired to develop an environment that calls for deep pockets and quiet persistence from the aspiring private pilot.
The cost of avgas in the United Kingdom is around $6.50 per gallon, which tends to produce pilots with an exceptional interest in the best fuel economy settings for their aircraft. Because the market is small and the majority of aircraft are imported from the United States, aircraft cost about 50 percent more to buy in Europe than they do in America. Poor flying weather leads to aircraft flying fewer hours per year, and these two factors mean significantly higher fixed costs per flying hour.
Apart from being all-pervasive, the bureaucracy is also expensive. The rule in Britain is that the costs of the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA, equivalent to your FAA) must be borne by the users of the system, not subsidized out of the public purse. In effect, therefore, this state monopoly can charge whatever it pleases for its services. For example, the CAA is currently charging an administration fee of about $230 to issue a private pilot certificate. This lasts you only five years, and the periodic renewals of this piece of paper cost a further $100. Some of the world's most expensive clerks must work at the CAA's offices.
It will not surprise you to hear that aircraft hire comes a bit more expensive than you are used to paying in the States. Solo hire of a Cessna 172 from an airfield near London costs around $165 per hour, excluding landing fees, which can be anything from $5 to $30 a shot. I look fondly in my logbook at the last time I hired a Piper PA-28 Archer in Florida for around $60 per hour with no landing fees, and I sigh a bitter sigh.
As discouraging as all this expense and official rapacity has been, it has not managed to crush private flying out of the European system so far, although light aviation has become very much a minority pursuit in Spain, Italy, and Greece, where it was never strongly established. In England and elsewhere in northern Europe, however, adversity has tended to nurture a determined resolve to carry on flying, no matter what obstacles may be erected. Recently, however, the pain has been racked up several notches by the arrival of the Joint Aviation Authority (JAA), and Europe and private pilots are now facing a new and altogether more sinister monster.
The concept was simple enough: Instead of 36 different state aviation authorities administering 36 different sets of rules, we could have just one set. Harmony would rule throughout European skies, and all would be simple and straightforward. So, more than 10 years ago, the politicians got together for a bit of a junket by the Mediterranean, and the chairperson of the conference said: "Shall we have a pan-European set of rules to be called the Joint Aviation Regulations [JARs]?" The politicians cheerfully assented and got back to the junketing. Back home the politicians then told their 36 different state aviation authorities to get on and agree to the details of these JARs between them.
With the immense boon of hindsight, it is easy to see that while a European Air Transport license offers benefits for professional pilots, there is no particular advantage in this for the private pilot. In the unlikely case of my driving to Poland, say, and then deciding to rent a Polish aircraft, however much I might wave about my JAA European license, I cannot see any Polish FBO sending me off solo without a flight check. Among other things, they will want to see that I can speak aviation Polish in the pattern, and know all the local rules and practices. In any case the existing International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) mutual recognition rules will probably achieve limited recognition of my British license in other countries.
Because the politicians solemnly agreed in their conclave by the sea that there should be JARs for private pilots, the representatives of the 30-plus state aviation authorities then had to search for a compromise set of rules to which they could all subscribe. If the Ruritanian regulations have always required that pilots should carry a spare pair of pants, then at some time past the Ruritarian Minister for Aviation will have enthralled the members of the Ruritarian People's Assembly with his explanation of the safety benefits of the Spare Pants rule. To depart from such a hallowed precept would signal to all Europe that there had never really been any point in it, and that would mean loss of face for all true Ruritarians — especially the guys at the Ruritarian Aviation Authority. You may conceive, therefore, that the spirit of compromise was noticeably lacking between the representatives of the many aviation authorities.
Quite early on, it must have occurred to most of these representatives that what they were engaged upon in the conception of the new compromise regulations could be the demise of all of the different state authorities. While Brussels might well benefit from the creation of a new JAA, most of the people seated around the conference table were likely to find themselves out of a job when state aviation authorities became redundant. So you will not be altogether surprised to hear that they evolved an exceedingly cunning plan. While the JARs would paint the regulations with a broad brush, the individual state authorities would continue in the role of "interpreting" the JARs in the local context and filling in the details to suit the local conditions. So in addition to the ever-burgeoning bureaucracy in Brussels that is the JAA, we now have the 36 state authorities all busily engaged in "interpreting."
Let me give you an example of how the cunning plan works out in practice. For years, airliners have been fitted with inertial navigation systems (INS) that make the traditional airways system based on VORs rather pointless and expensive. If everyone flying IFR had suitable area navigation equipment, you could free up the airways system enormously and maybe abolish all the VORs eventually. Thus it was decided that by April 1999 all controlled IFR would require area navigation equipment. For those without INS, which was virtually all of general aviation, this presented serious problems that seemed to have been unforeseen by the JAA. In a mad last-minute scramble, different aviation authorities issued different lists of what they thought was acceptable for area navigation. They also issued exemptions from the requirements that applied to differing flight-level maximums in different states.
So nowadays I can get into my Piper Arrow and fly IFR above Flight Level 095 (9,500 feet msl), where area nav is required in the U.K., with my British-approved area nav kit (a Bendix/King KNS 80). I can journey over to France, where there should be no problem as they have exempted everyone below FL195. When I get to Germany, however, there may be problems as it bans — not just fails to approve — the KNS 80. I couldn't tell you what the different rules about area nav are in the other 33 states, but I guarantee that they display a splendid variety of conflicting requirements. By the way, for real area nav I actually use GPS, but please don't let the authorities know that, as my set is not one of the few GPS receivers that are officially approved for area nav. So the KNS 80 gives me official compliance and the GPS gives me navigation.
I recently came across a British pilot who had just bought a German-registered aircraft and was putting it on the British register. He was incandescent on learning from his engineers that the British area nav requirements do not allow his particular GPS to be slaved to his horizontal situation indicator (HSI), although the German requirements do. So the slaving facility had to be disconnected to get the aircraft on to the British register. And this is harmonization?
The differences between the new European private pilot certificate and your FAA private certificate are interesting and instructive. Wherever you are based, you need a medical. With no actual statistical evidence to support the theory, the European authority simply feels that pilots need to be as fit as professional sportsmen to be allowed into the air. So electrocardiograms, pulmonary function tests, tests for diabetes, and various other delights weed out a good number of applicants who would pass the American class three medical with ease. These little extra tests have to be paid for, and the JAA medical works out to be about twice the price of the FAA variety. If twice the price does not trouble you, how about twice the frequency? Around here they don't much like private pilots who are getting on a bit, and European pilots over the age of 50 need a medical each year.
Once you have your medical you can embark upon your training. The syllabus here is pretty much the same as the American variety. The minimum training requirement is 45 hours, as compared with your 40. The ground school, however, is a very different kettle of fish. The European view is that any private pilot is a potential ATP. (Napoleon used to say that every private soldier carried a field marshal's baton in his knapsack, and I imagine this is a modern application of the same principle.) So the European ground school takes you a significant way toward your ATP exams. The ground school exams take some six hours to plow through.
If you think that the European certificate requirements are a bit excessive, you should consider the instrument rating for some real surprises. For a start, there is a fundamental cultural difference here. The FAA wants as many private pilots to be instrument-rated as possible, while the JAA wants as few as possible. It is the European view that it is safest to confine private pilots to VFR in uncontrolled airspace, leaving IFR and controlled airspace to the professionals. The concept that it is everybody's airspace has few supporters in government; all English airways, for example, are Class A airspace. Lip service is grudgingly paid to the idea of the freedom of the skies by offering an IFR rating, but it is made so difficult and expensive that nobody but a diehard enthusiast would seek one. The ground school for the IFR rating is a considerable hurdle and several hundred hours of study culminate in two days of examination. Past test papers are kept a state secret, even more so the correct answers. Flight training of a minimum of 50 hours for a single-engine rating is required, and 20 hours of this can be performed on a simulator. The training has to be carried out at an approved school. Approval is expensive to obtain, so training is correspondingly expensive — say $250 per hour in a Piper Warrior. The flight test is carried out by an aviation authority-employed (not just approved) flight examiner. He conducts the flight test from certain specified airfields only by prior appointment that can sometimes be weeks or months ahead. He appears resplendent in full captain's uniform and you pay $900 just for his services. All the other costs of the flight are extra. First-time passes of the instrument rating skill test are around 30 percent, so more than two-thirds of candidates have to go through this expensive rigmarole at least twice.
Having acquired this rare qualification, you need to renew it each year with another flight test. Unlike the FAA rating, instrument flying recency alone cannot keep your certificate valid.
But putting aside all these tiresome little quibbles, with an instrument rating you can launch off into the simply amazing world of flying the European airways system. You have to experience it to believe it. Deep down in the bowels of some headquarters building in Brussels they have a vast brooding computer that presides over all airways flights throughout Europe. The Controlled Flight Management Unit (CFMU) is a valiant attempt to bring order into the sky of chaos that is an entire continent wide, but under the control of 36 different sovereign powers and their individual air traffic control authorities.
Even VFR flying can get complicated in this airspace. If I want to fly in a straight line the 150 nautical miles from Dunkirk, in France, to Longuyon, also in France, I shall cross and recross the wandering national border with Belgium nine times. So, unless I choose a more pilot-friendly route, I shall spend my time endlessly going through the radio routines for crossing a national border. Common sense would suggest a rationalization of the air traffic control area boundaries, but national pride prevents a Belgian controller from having authority in French skies, and vice versa.
With IFR, the problem arises from pinch points in the airways system, particularly around Zurich and London, and the job of the CFMU computer is to sequence airways flights so as to avoid any traffic jams in the system. It does this by a slot system, so that your flight may get a specific takeoff time allocated, and you must either be good and ready for your slot, or risk losing it. To get a slot you must file an IFR flight plan, and you must do so a minimum of four hours in advance.
Now the filing of a flight plan in a form acceptable to the CFMU computer is a great mystery that we are only slowly coming to grips with. Like most computers, it is very clever, but also very stupid. If it finds anything in your plan that does not match its library of what is acceptable, then it rejects the whole plan. What is more, it rejects it without giving any reason. It's like having a word processor with a spell checker that tells you that you have a mistake somewhere on your screen, but won't tell you what it is.
So, having filed, you do well to check later that your plan was accepted, or you could turn up at the field the next day only to learn that your plan was rejected, and you must now identify the reason and then refile — at least four hours ahead, remember.
This is not just a test of your flight plan completion skills; you have to learn the particular vagaries of the computer. It sometimes, for instance, rejects a below-airways flight plan, even though the requested cruise level is at a safe altitude and the aircraft may not have the performance to reach the airway on this sector. Between one point and another it may accept only one possible route, rejecting all others. You soon learn to enter in the "Remarks" box: "Amendment of flight plan acceptable," 1ut this is not a complete answer because it has no official standing.
Once the CFMU computer has decided to accept your plan it then has to compute whether your flight needs a slot. The slot time, if any, will be issued not more, and sometimes significantly less, than two hours before departure. A flight through a busy part of the system probably attracts a slot time and it is often around 30 minutes or so later than the requested Off Blocks time. So flights needing a slot often start out with a half-hour delay.
Well, that's not the end of the world, but what if your day's flying comprises several legs on the airways system? You will probably file all the legs at least the day before, and you will not know then how slot delays are going to affect your progress. So you make hopeful guesses and maybe end up pointlessly cooling your heels waiting for your third leg to start. But things may go otherwise, "for tyme lost may nought recovered be," as our joint forbear Geoffrey Chaucer observed; thus can you find yourself trying to refuel, visit the comfort station, and grab a Snickers all in 20 minutes, or lose that vital slot.
By now the major European air operators have learned how to work this system to their advantage. They commonly file for the same flight, but at Off Blocks times spaced at half-hour intervals, eventually choosing whatever slot time suits best and ignoring the rest. As the higher cruise levels are in big demand, they may file for, say, FL270, knowing that there will be delays for the highest levels, $ut expecting to negotiate their way up there with air traffic control while in the climb.
Assuming that you make your slot time OK and launch yourself into the system, you will discover some more interesting facts about the European airways scene. The light-aircraft pilot, probably flying not much above FL150, if that, will find that his carefully constructed planned route is of no consequence to controllers — who often seem quite unaware of it, in any case. Their aim is to keep you out of the way of the heavier metal climbing and descending through your level.
So flying airways can often become a tortuous affair of ducking and diving from one new waypoint to the next. The controllers seem to make it all up as you go along, and at each frequency and controller change you seem to be issued an entirely new route. You soon learn not to bother with entering a route into your GPS, but to become adept at recognizing the names of unfamiliar waypoints and checking that all possible such waypoints are loaded into your GPS database before you set out.
French controllers have a particular penchant for giving you routings to waypoints that do not even exist on your low-level airways en route chart. The fact that it exists, but only on the high level chart, is good enough for the French.
So far, navigation charges have not been levied on light aircraft using the system, but this is not through any charitable feelings toward the small fry. It's just the result of problems caused by a lack of any accurate and up-to-date European database of registered private owners. There are further difficulties associated with calculating the route distance when light aircraft so often depart from or arrive at points that are not in the computer's database. Given time these temporary glitches will be solved, and then we shall all be paying for using the system — and paying handsomely, no doubt.
Having set all these woes down on paper, I find myself asking why I bother at all. Why not look for some simpler and cheaper recreation, like owning a string of racehorses or a steam yacht? You can imagine just how much I am looking forward to some mountain flying on your West Coast. So please make quite sure that you go on keeping your American flying inexpensive and your American skies free of too much unfriendly regulation.
Nigel Everett, AOPA 1370411, is a regular contributor to Pilot, the leading British private flying magazine, and also is the editor of Network, the journal of the fPL/IR Network for Europe (an association for European private pilots who hold an instrument rating).
