  We present early results from the JCMT Plane Survey (JPS), which has surveyed
the northern inner Galactic plane between longitudes l=7 and l=63 degrees in
the 850-{\mu}m continuum with SCUBA-2, as part of the James Clerk Maxwell
Telescope Legacy Survey programme. Data from the l=30 degree survey region,
which contains the massive star-forming regions W43 and G29.96, are analysed
after approximately 40% of the observations had been completed. The
pixel-to-pixel noise is found to be 19 mJy/beam, after a smooth over the beam
area, and the projected equivalent noise levels in the final survey are
expected to be around 10 mJy/beam. An initial extraction of compact sources was
performed using the FellWalker method resulting in the detection of 1029
sources above a 5-{\sigma} surface-brightness threshold. The completeness
limits in these data are estimated to be around 0.2 Jy/beam (peak flux density)
and 0.8 Jy (integrated flux density) and are therefore probably already
dominated by source confusion in this relatively crowded section of the survey.
The flux densities of extracted compact sources are consistent with those of
matching detections in the shallower ATLASGAL survey. We analyse the virial and
evolutionary state of the detected clumps in the W43 star-forming complex and
find that they appear younger than the Galactic-plane average.
