Incoming Chairman’s Acceptance Speech, HAA Annual Symposium – A Future Strategy

In accepting the responsibility of taking over as your Chairman once again I just wanted to say a few words about how I see our future strategy. Today we enjoy looking at the past and learning what we can about historic aircraft and sharing in the knowledge of how they were flown and operated, but we also should not lose sight of tomorrow, and what we need to do to ensure the historic and heritage aircraft we love are rebuilt, restored, and kept airworthy here in the UK.

My visit to New Zealand in 2011 and the recent return to the skies of the de Havilland Mosquito at Ardmore Airfield, combined with and the continuing success of Gene de Marco with his collection of WW1 war bird replicas at air shows in Masterton have focussed attention on New Zealand as perhaps taking over from Britain as the centre of excellence in the aircraft restoration business.

There is no doubt that the superb quality of work by AVspecs and Vintage Aviator Ltd and others is increasingly positioning New Zealand as the place to go for those wealthy owners to commission bespoke restorations. This year’s winner of the Freddie March Spirit of Aviation Competition at the Goodwood Revival was a Beech Stagger Wing that had been beautifully restored to airworthy condition for its owner Bill Charney by the Croydon Aircraft Company – not Croydon here in the UK but at Mandeville South Island New Zealand!

We have here in Britain an historic aircraft engineering industry that has an outstanding reputation for excellence in historic and war bird aircraft restorations and has been for decades the place to get the job done, more so than other countries such as New Zealand, but over time this reputation has been eroded by being forced to continually battle against a less than enlightened CAA airworthiness authority. The UK CAA using the emerging EASA directives as justification for the rules by which UK Annex II aircraft are issued permits-to-fly, continues to impose upon the historic aircraft industry burdensome and costly regulations with little flexibility from airline aircraft standards, and persisting in a “One Size Fits All” approach.

While the New Zealand CAA seems to warmly welcome vintage and historic aircraft back into the skies under their Part 115 regulations introduced a year ago, the UK CAA remains exceedingly over cautious and over controlling, not least when it comes to the assessment and approval of new-build and replacement parts where these parts are no longer plentifully available from ex-military sources or original manufacturers supplies. Organisations in the UK are frequently subjected to onerous and expensive approval procedures originally designed for our now shrunken aircraft manufacturing industry.

New Zealand has adopted a different philosophy of “Venture Aviation” where the industry accepts responsibility for a greater degree of the risk of restoring and flying historic aircraft. By getting the industry to accept more responsibility for standards and safety, the New Zealand CAA under Part 115 has created a regulatory environment in which historic aircraft restoration and flying can flourish safely and at the right cost.

Here in the UK, the CAA Airworthiness is reluctant to change and the HAA has to continue to challenge the Authority to regulate more sensibly and allow the industry to look after itself more with attendant reduction in costs, and less restrictive oversight and with less draconian audits by the CAA surveyors. Our new President Rick Peacock-Edwards mentioned there is a new mood in the CAA stemming downwards from the Board and from the Group Director of Safety Regulation Gretchen Haskins, but within the Airworthiness Authority it would seem the “old guard” is reluctant to let go, and although their recent tinkering with BCAR’s such as the proposal to slim down the A8-20 approvals system might seem on the surface to be positive steps in the right direction, they are not changing that much, and there is a long way to go before we can match what New Zealand has. Here in Britain the CAA inspectors and auditors are clinging to what they know best – that is the onerous and expensive approval procedures originally designed for our now shrunken aircraft manufacturing industry.

If change does not come about, we will see increasingly those wealthy owners of historic aircraft taking their projects elsewhere, probably to New Zealand, and we will see our own historic aircraft restoration and maintenance companies close up shop or pack-up and move abroad. More recent news has emerged about the recovery of a large collection of Spitfire Mk 14’s with RR Griffon engines in Burma. If unearthed and placed on the market where will the owners go to have them brought back to airworthy condition? Probably New Zealand rather than here because undoubtedly as things are today in the UK, the path to the skies will be less onerous and not so costly as here.

In the HAA, if we see it as worthwhile to go on battling to keep the historic aircraft industry thriving, we will have to engage with the CAA Airworthiness division until change such as that achieved in New Zealand is brought about, otherwise there will be no British registered historic aircraft, no preservation, no air shows and no war birds to fly.

This is why I am letting you know that the HAA will focus on historic aircraft engineering issues more energetically than we have ever done up to now. If we don’t support our engineers and get it right for their businesses to flourish again, we as an Association might as well pack up and go home because without historic aircraft being rebuilt and maintained here in the UK there will be no war birds, no heritage aircraft to fly, no air shows with old aeroplanes, and no future for historic aircraft except in museums.

I am determined that this decline should be arrested and we will persuade the CAA to adopt a similar regulatory regime to that in New Zealand or France, where the restoration of historic aircraft is treated as a special case, and not in the same way that commercial airline aircraft are maintained. The “one size fits all” regulatory regime does not work for historic aircraft operations and engineering.

So this is where we shall be concentrating our energies and as a first step in this new focus, I am announcing now a Spring conference to be held in February 2013 for historic aircraft stakeholders to collectively lobby the CAA for change. We need to concentrate our engineering efforts on what changes to regulations are needed to lift this regulatory and financial burden that is already killing off Britain’s historic aircraft industry.

Thank you for your support and trust in allowing me once again to be Chairman of this great Association.

Wally Epton