After very many months of delay, the CAA have finally approved the conventional navigation route which Gatwick had originally submitted to them in May 2018 following the outcome of the Judicial Review (JR).This is to all intents the route that was being flown in 2012, before the CAA and Gatwick introduced P-RNAV with the disastrous consequences the affected communities know only too well.
Unfortunately this historical Route 4 will not be published and implemented [1] until probably Autumn 2019, because Gatwick have been told by the CAA it needs to be integrated with Air Traffic Control (ATC) systems. Not all route changes need to be integrated with ATC systems in this way, but apparently this republished historical route does – according to the CAA.
We had originally expected this conventional route to be republished in Autumn 2018, but CAA delays have brought us to this point, and our lawyers wrote to the CAA on 16th April setting out our position regarding the unreasonable delay. Within this letter our Aviation Consultants ‘Cyrrus’ confirmed there is no practical reason why planes cannot return to flying ‘coded overlays’ that replicate the historical route now due to be republished.
A superficial and dismissive response to this letter was received from the CAA, and our lawyers have now written in formal legal terms to insist they now comply with the terms of the process they themselves sanctioned in 2012/2013 – by deciding if the current (and now temporary) RNAV-1 route replicates the conventional route now due to be republished.
You would not need 20-20 vision to see that replication has not been achieved between these two routes, and that the only lawful outcome of making this comparison is to denotify the current RNAV-1 route, thereby allowing the route to return to its 2012 position.
We await the CAA’s reply.
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[1] Republication and implementation of this conventional route will not of itself lead to the aircraft returning to fly in their 2012 location, so long as the instructions still remain in the pilots’ manual (the AIP) to fly the current unlawfully imposed (RNAV-1) route.