peter-h
Line Up and Wait
It now looks like this will be coming in, effective April 2014.
It hits all US-reg aircraft in Europe (some thousands of them) if the "operator" is based in the EU. The citizenship of the pilot is not relevant. (Yes, the workarounds for operator residence are fairly obvious for some bigger ops, but not so (IMHO, IANAL) for a straight private owner-pilot).
I had the FAA CPL/IR already but did the Euro (JAR-FCL) IR pre-emptively as an insurance policy - writeup here. Sorry it is a bit long, but I wrote it to help out others on how to cut through most of the crap, like the ridiculous exams (7 of them). I used the 15hr IR conversion route, which is not bad but you still have to do all the written exams.
You Americans should be glad to not have this rubbish where you are.
And it is going ahead despite the EU having nearly fallen apart financially, as the "Euro currency experiment" hits the buffers in the south (and Ireland).
I just hope they don't shaft you with route charges. Here you pay over 1999kg if IFR and over 5700kg if VFR. The charge is quite significant - of the order of $100-200 to cross France so not far short of similar to what the fuel itself would cost in say a TBM700. Pilots do all kinds of tricks to get around it: there is an STC for a Seneca which changes its MTOW (in the flight manual only) to 1999kg
and lots fly "VFR" in all weather, not always safely (google N2195B for one of many).
It hits all US-reg aircraft in Europe (some thousands of them) if the "operator" is based in the EU. The citizenship of the pilot is not relevant. (Yes, the workarounds for operator residence are fairly obvious for some bigger ops, but not so (IMHO, IANAL) for a straight private owner-pilot).
I had the FAA CPL/IR already but did the Euro (JAR-FCL) IR pre-emptively as an insurance policy - writeup here. Sorry it is a bit long, but I wrote it to help out others on how to cut through most of the crap, like the ridiculous exams (7 of them). I used the 15hr IR conversion route, which is not bad but you still have to do all the written exams.
You Americans should be glad to not have this rubbish where you are.
And it is going ahead despite the EU having nearly fallen apart financially, as the "Euro currency experiment" hits the buffers in the south (and Ireland).
I just hope they don't shaft you with route charges. Here you pay over 1999kg if IFR and over 5700kg if VFR. The charge is quite significant - of the order of $100-200 to cross France so not far short of similar to what the fuel itself would cost in say a TBM700. Pilots do all kinds of tricks to get around it: there is an STC for a Seneca which changes its MTOW (in the flight manual only) to 1999kg
and lots fly "VFR" in all weather, not always safely (google N2195B for one of many).
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