172driver wrote:
I hadn’t seen the Planecheck ad, but it looks like the guy was setting up an air taxi operation. As far as we know, as a PPL without IR. And that’s legal in EASAland? Really? The mind boggles.
It would certainly not be legal to run an air taxi operation without a CPL. Without an IR I think it is theoretically possible, but customers will quickly get frustrated over the cancelled flights over weather.
You also need an AOC (Air Operator Certificate) for the organization (you need it as soon as you sell A-B flights).
SEP A-to-A can be VFR only.
Like bosco wrote: It’s cost-sharing. From the “customer” perspective it might not be much different from an air taxi operation but from the operater’s perspective it differs very much, at least for his bank account. One drains money by definition and the other can at least legally bring in money.
RobertL18C wrote:
SEP A-to-A can be VFR only.
Do you mean that this is the only way you can have an AOC that does not include IFR (with all that entails). Surely you can do CAT VFR A-to-B with a SEP?
@A_A I didn’t imply that. To my knowledge from the UK, an AOC SEP will be VFR only. There are some actual A to A outfits, and they can operate from different locations. Am not aware of any A to B SEP AOC operations, and while in theory they might be approved, practically in our climate they would not be commercially viable.
maxbc wrote:
You also need an AOC (Air Operator Certificate) for the organization (you need it as soon as you sell A-B flights).
Which is exactly what this pilot did. We can discuss the semantics here until the cows come home, but with that kind of advertising to the general public on FB that’s what it was: selling tickets for an A to B flight.
I read again the advertisement (posted by Peter at the beginning of the post), and I think it’s a lot “cleaner” in that regard that what has been depicted here. Even though he uses the term “tickets”, he is clearly stating that he’s taking passengers along for the trip, and the ticket cost varies depending on the number of people. It’s definitely not air taxi, it may be a paid excursion in disguise (but that would imply he makes money off it, which is not established).
I agree there are a number of problems with this advertisement (“all-weather”, and the lack of risk knowledge and cancellation possibility awareness by the general public), but the potential commercial nature of the flight is not one of them (at least not established with current evidence).
I’m not shocked by the price itself. It’s in the same league as Wingly prices (which sometimes greatly exceed direct operating costs). A break-down of the (planned) flying time and Commander hourly costs could help here.
I agree he wasn’t doing it to make money; €300 is nowhere near enough. The costs of running an old Commander with its AD list as long as your arm will drive the real cost of that flight well past what he was charging.
He was probably just trying to recover his fuel costs.
The current EASA cost sharing rules enable one to get pretty cheap flying but do not enable one to make the sort of money which charter ops make – say €5000 for a one way flight from Biggin Hill to Cannes.
