Comparing national registrations

I got busted years later for importing the Aztec from Alderney without paying VAT. The authorities were quite convinced that it was an innocent error and all I had to do was pay the VAT (and a tiny amount of interest.)

Peter wrote:

FWIW, if Thursday’s vote is OUT then nothing will happen for a while – anything up to about 2 years.

And Brexit might still not happen – the referendum is advisory only, effectively it’s just a fancy opinion poll. It has no force in law whatsoever. An act of parliament will still be required before anything can happen, and Parliament might vote against it anyway, or the Lords might block it.

However, I suspect there would be chaos if Parliament voted against the result of the referendum, with many politicians losing their seats in the following election, not to mention the protests and civil unrest.

Peter wrote:

it was claimed this was because I required dual flying i.e. no self fly hire

I don’t think that’s a mere claim – if no self flight hire is allowed, I’m not at all surprised it didn’t fly. I would never bother even getting checked out in a plane I could not subsequently then fly solo. It adds yet just more hassle to the whole rental process, now not only do I have to schedule the plane, I have to bring along an instructor on every single flight who will expect to be paid, and will need to be put up in a hotel if I went anywhere. There is nothing more pointless than a rental plane with no self-fly hire, especially one that’s not really a good aircraft for going for a 30 minute bimble around the local area. I’m surprised you’re surprised it didn’t fly with those sort of conditions being imposed!

However, I suspect there would be chaos if Parliament voted against the result of the referendum, with many politicians losing their seats in the following election, not to mention the protests and civil unrest.

There will be a lot of political chaos anyway because even a STAY vote will be really close, so the mandate will be poor. That much is certain. Mind you, didn’t Ireland and Sweden just keep repeating the referendums until they got a YES? However the UK would not repeat this if it was an OUT vote.

I don’t think that’s a mere claim – if no self flight hire is allowed, I’m not at all surprised it didn’t fly.

I agree with you of course, for yourself, but it depends on the market. A typical commercial pilot ATO trains people most of whom have absolutely zero interest in flying GA. Book yourself into a hotel used by the clients and watch them. Nearly all are 20+ and who somehow got the 80k-100k and they want to be the next Leonardo DiCaprio. They sit there watching Global Girl I am not going to post the link to Gyrocopter Girl… They do all the assignments around a big table, together. They just want a cockpit to sit in and log hours, and currently it has to be a plane And the JAA CPL/IR is 100% dual. Then they start thumbing through airline adverts. Some will work as FIs to build the hours up but almost no FI I have known personally is interested in flying private GA. They don’t have the income to pay for avgas, for a start… Some of them are actually really good pilots (I know some) but I suspect that those have all got into GA to some extent.

I went ahead with that proposition because the instructor promised me 100+ hrs, all dual, all IR training. That was before I discovered he had a fake ATPL… well I am sure you read the rest of that story. We live and learn, and GA has a steep learning curve.

Peter wrote:

Mind you, didn’t […] Sweden just keep repeating the referendums until they got a YES?

That was Denmark. And it wasn’t EU membership as such but the Maastricht treaty that was rejected by the Danes. The referendum was held in 1992 and Denmark had already been an EU member since 1973. They did repeat the referendum the year after and got a YES, but at that point Denmark had negotiated several exemptions to the treaty.

Two of the exemptions concerned EMU membership and Justice and Home Affairs. The Danish government tried again with new referenda about EMU in 2000 and about Justice and Home Affairs in 2015. Both were rejected again. After the 2000 referendum they seem to have given up on the Euro.

Denmark has held an unusually large number of referenda (8) relating to the EU.

Peter wrote:

There will be a lot of political chaos anyway because even a STAY vote will be really close, so the mandate will be poor.

But really limited only to squabbling mainly within the Tory party, and quite frankly they brought it on themselves. Most people who voted ‘leave’ would accept that they lost and move on. If however there were a leave vote and Parliament blocked it, then leave voters would be furious as “the will of the people” had just been ignored by the political elite – I would imagine there would be a lot of huge protests in the streets, and there would be safe seats that wouldn’t be safe any more. The whole debate has been highly polarizing, but this will end up slowly defusing itself in the event of a “remain” vote, but a leave vote that Parliament vetos? It would just open the wound further.

True. Let’s get it back on track.

What type of aircraft are you looking at, @ch.ess?

What is your “maintenance management” capability?

If there were a clear advantage, for Germans, if they used a different EASA reg than D, then at least a few more people would do it.

And yes, it’s sometimes type specific. Older D-reg’d Cessnas over 1.2 tons can now no longer get an ARC renewal, unless the infamous SIDs have been carried out. Some owners are currently moving to the G-reg, but even that is a can of worms. Achim just did that.