Aviation International News senior correspondent Ian Goold has been involved in aerospace since 1964 and in aviation media for more than 40 years. He enjoyed a 20-year career at Flight International magazine, where he was latterly air-transport editor before turning freelance in 1993. A winner of the European Regions Airline Association Hank McGonagle award for excellence in aerospace journalism and a Royal Aeronautical Society Aerospace Journalist of the Year global&nbsp;award, he has edited or contributed to aerospace and aviation magazines, special publications, and websites in Africa, Asia/Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, and North and South America. Ian entered aerospace as an apprentice at the British Aircraft Corporation at Brooklands (Weybridge), where he worked on production and final assembly lines of the Vickers Super VC10, and BAC One-Eleven , and manufacture of Concorde major sub-assemblies. He subsequently graduated from the BAC Design Training School to work in the airframe structures drawing office (including design of international future projects, such as the Panavia Tornado multi-role combat aircraft) before joining Flight International in 1973. Apart from years of reading aircraft magazines and books, his first direct contact with aviation media had come during the early 1970s when he was involved at Brooklands with the Weybridge Man-powered Aircraft Group, which designed and built the tenth aircraft to fly under purely human power. As an aviation journalist, he has worked at more than&nbsp; 50 of the major biennial&nbsp;global and regional international aerospace industry shows at Le Bourget, Farnborough, Singapore, and Dubai (having missed attending only one "Farnborough" since 1960), plus innumerable NBAA, HAI, (U.S.) AOPA, and EBACE Conventions and ERA Assemblies. His favourite aircraft is the Hawker Hunter, of which – as a schoolboy – he heard hundreds make their first flights from Dunsfold, where also on September 24, 2013, he saw the penultimate landing of the VC10 (happily involving an example of which he had witnessed the maiden takeoff in 1970) a day before the last example made the design's final flight (unless, of course....).

Senior correspondent

Ian Goold

Flight-time limitations that apply to airlines cannot be applied to business aviation, according to European Business Aviation Association (EBAA) president and chief executive Brian Humphries, who emphasized that the rules governing flight-crew duty times should accommodate “the nature and pattern of business aircraft operations.” The EASA participates in the <a href="?q=node/25234">flight-times limitation (FTL) working group</a> and will join a new EASA FTL group to consider such operations as business aviation, air taxis and night-cargo (with resultant proposals slated for publication in late 2013).
To establish a position based on EASA’s draft NPA and industry best practice–something Humphries characterizes as a major achievement–the EBAA considered rules in six leading countries. “EASA wanted hard rules; operators wanted minimum hard regulation. All drafts were shared, with an EBAA [scientific study] supporting requests to deviate from new regulations” and it became “increasingly obvious” that EASA rules would not work for business aviation, particularly helicopters.
Summarizing EBAA’s position, Humphries emphasized that a split-duty system is the “absolute cornerstone” of business aviation, with pilots flying “out in the morning and back in the evening.” Seats or bunks for augmented crewmembers–“very important if operators are to achieve up to 18 hours ultra-long-range aircraft performance,”–can be in the passenger cabin. FTL should not “be driven by dogma”; pilot fatigue is a consideration for high-utilization operators such as low-cost carriers, but “tiredness is not the same as fatigue. If business aviation has to follow [airline crew-standby rules] it would not have a business; we need a different model,” said Humphries. –Ian Goold

EBAA: crew flight-time rules should match nature and pattern of operations  

Flight-time limitations that apply to airlines cannot be applied to business aviation, according to European Business Aviation Association (EBAA) president

2024 Corporate Aviation Leadership Summit

AIN Products

SUBSCRIPTIONS

RESOURCES

ABOUT AIN