A million flight training aircraft movements per year?
Each year the UK CAA publishes figures for the UK’s 60 busiest airports. This includes General Aviation (GA) airports as well as commercial airports, and alongside schedule service transport, charter and GA aircraft movements, the CAA also reports on flying club and flight training activity. FTN has analysed flight training activity at those airports showing more than 1,000 flight training movements per year. There is a significant...
Where is the next generation of pilots? (Part 2)
In the first part of this article, the efforts of airsports organisations such as the British Gliding Association and the Light Aircraft Association to attract new, young, pilots into aviation were detailed. The second part of this article looks at what is being done in other sectors of aviation to ensure that the current generation of aviators does not represent a ‘high water’ mark in pilot numbers. While airsports groups have led...
Register of ‘VFR significant areas’ updated
The Future Airspace Strategy VFR Implementation Group (FASVIG) has just completed version 2 of its ‘Register of Significant VFR Areas’. The term VFR Significant Area is applied to a volume of airspace which has been identified as being particularly important to VFR operations. A VSA might take the form of a route, a zone or an area chosen for its particular importance to its VFR users. The objective is to highlight the importance of a...
Northampton Sywell gets GNSS Instrument Approaches
The UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) has approved a set of GNSS (satellite navigation) instrument approaches to Sywell airfield near Northampton. The newly-approved procedures are some of the very few GNSS instrument approaches to a UK General Aviation airfield so far approved by the CAA, which has been criticised (not least by the Minster for Transport Grant Shapps) for the slow pace of approvals of GNSS instrument approaches, with...
