You should try it here in the UK, where the government has decided to
privatise ATC, so you can imagine the biggest shareholders will get priority
on approach - "US Air, you are no longer number 1, please go around and join
the line of British planes landing, you are currently number twelve!"

To get a US licence on the back of a British one is free from the FAA, but
you have to pay our CAA $25 to release your details to them. To get a UK
licence on the basis of an FAA one costs nearly $300.
The best bit is the weather charts. You can get them by premium rate fax,
about $2.50 per minute, with the slowest transmission speed known to man. Or
you can pay a subscription to the weather office. Best way to get TAF's and
METAR's now is to download them from websites of other european countries
governments, where they are freely available.

John

"Randy at Home" wrote in
message
. cable.rogers.com...
"Paul Tomblin" wrote in message
...
| In a previous article, (Andrew Sarangan) said:
| (Paul Tomblin) wrote in message
| ...
| No. NavCanada are a bunch of greedy selfish *******s, and you can
quote
| me on that.
| Are you saying that the FAA is overly generous? The FAA does not
| provide any funding for AOPA, Airnav or Aeroplanner. These are all
| individual efforts. Is NavCanada refusing to release airport database
| to individuals? If that is the case then you may have a point.
|
| I get FAA data on CD for $36 every 56 days. And there is no restriction
| on redistributing that data - I put it on a ftp site for anybody else to
| grab.
|
| NavCanada, on the other hand, forced the originator of the Canadian
| equivalent data (Energy Mines and Resources, later National Resources
| Canada) to stop distributing it to anybody but them. And they flat out
| refuse to distribute it to the general public. Sorry, they don't "flat
| out" anything - they just tell you they have to do one more thing before
| they can, and then they stop talking to you.
|
| I've contacted them numerous times about it. One time they told me
they'd
| do it if I signed a paper holding them harmless in the event of a
lawsuit,
| and referred me to their legal staff, but the legal staff refused to
draw
| up the paper, and told me that they wouldn't accept a paper that I had a
| lawyer draw up. Eventually, in every case, they just stopped answering
my
| email.

The key difference between the FAA and NavCanada, is that the FAA is a
government organization, while NavCanada is privately run. They're not
incented to do anything for free. NavCanada didn't "force" anyone to do
anything. They were granted it by the MoT, much to the chagrine of a bunch
of private pilots. They closed valuable flight service stations at key
training locations in Canada (gripe: Buttonville for one) against massive
protests that fell on deaf ears. IMO, they're be just as happy to get rid
of
us all, and just service the airlines at major airports.