Menu Sign In Contact FAQ
Banner
Welcome to our forums

EASA a/c - maintenance in EASA country other than state of registry?

About 15 years ago I stopped looking at Autotrader and creating my fantasy-car-collection-of-the-week. Naturally, I replaced it with poring over the aircraft-for-sale ads and creating my fantasy-hangar-collection-of-the-month. I'm sure that many of you do the same.

One thing that I'm curious about... there seem to be a lot of foreign aircraft resident in the UK. What do these people do for maintenance?

I have a fairly good understanding of why there are a lot of N-reg a/c here and I know that FAA A&P techs are easy enough to find and can perform or sign off maintenance work in the UK.

I find the EASA situation more confusing.

It's obvious that getting maintenance done on an aircraft in its own state of registry is straightforward, i.e. G-reg in the UK, D- in Germany, etc.

However, there seem to be plenty of non-UK EASA-registered aircraft which are resident in the UK. Notably, D- and PH- for some reason.

One D- reg aircraft I know is brought back to Germany for the annual - but is this really necessary? Could the work be done in the UK by any CAMO with Part M Subpart G approval?

I'm thinking that it could be to do with the expense of having things like logbooks and maintenance records translated into English for the issue of the first ARC from a new CAMO.

Or maybe it was just owner-preference and he liked his German CAMO.

I suppose the follow-on from this is: once an aircraft is registered in an EASA state, why bother re-registering it in another EASA state?

Please help me understand!

EGTT, The London FIR

In general terms, maintenance can be performed by a person with no aviation qualification. That is how the whole business works everywhere. Most people doing the actual work are not EASA 66 or A&Ps. What matters is the authorisations of the person inspecting and signing off the work.

If all work had to be done by a person with the authorisations then the whole business would grind to a halt, because getting any of these involves work experience, which means you have to be let loose on somebody's plane Same in medicine, law, etc...

To get an N-reg maintained, anywhere in the world, you need an A&P to work "under" and the Annual (and some other bits) needs an A&P/IA.

I don't know the current situation with EASA-regs. Certainly in the past if you had e.g. an F-reg plane you had to find an "F-reg" engineer to sign off the work. I think that has recently ended, and certainly it has rarely been worthwhile transferring from one EU reg to another EU reg unless you moved yourself (not least because any registry transfer is a potential can of worms) but no doubt others can answer.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Previous owner of my aircraft (it was on PH- registry but located in France) used both Netherlands and France based shops, so I assume there's no problem at all. Also, I know aircrafts from Croatia (on 9A- registry) being serviced in shops in Austria and Hungary.

LDZA LDVA, Croatia

The big EASA maintenance shops here in Germany have the ramp full of airplanes with foreign EASA regs so it's supposed to work. Studying the logbook of my aircraft (in Germany since its original delivery in 1979), everything is either in English or bilingual for the last 10 years. Before that it was mostly in German.

In my experience, a lot of shops only go for low hanging fruit. If a job actually involves real work or is slightly above trivial, they prefer to not do it. A foreign aircraft might just fulfil these criteria.

In my experience, a lot of shops only go for low hanging fruit. If a job actually involves real work or is slightly above trivial, they prefer to not do it. A foreign aircraft might just fulfil these criteria.

There is a lot of truth in that - or perhaps in a different way: they will do the work but they overcharge, because they know that anybody operating a foreign reg plane has good reasons for doing so and is willing to pay extra for them. In fact that is pretty well the whole story on N-reg

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Thanks everybody - that's useful information.
Seems like it's possible to get any EASA aircraft maintained in any EASA state.

EGTT, The London FIR

When I was arranging maintenance for my aircraft, which is G-reg but based in Czech Republic, I was told that it doesn't matter where in the EASAland it is maintained, but keeping CAMO in the state of registry would save some bureaucratic hassle and make the airworthiness paperwork less likely to fall through the cracks. So that's what I did.

LKBU (near Prague), Czech Republic

---One D- reg aircraft I know is brought back to Germany for the annual - but is this really necessary? Could the ---work be done in the UK by any CAMO with Part M Subpart G approval?

Purchasing my aircraft in Germany I remained on D- registration. Living in Slovakia I had the problem how to organise the maintenance and ARC of a D- reg. It was finally resolved by asking directly at German LBA.

I do the maintenance and ARC related work in Slovakia in a shop certified by Slovak CAA. The shop is an authorised repair shop but not authorised to issue the ARC (not Subpart G). They issue only a kind of 'recommendation' which is then sent to German LBA and the ARC itself is issued by LBA.

LBA sends me the ARC by post. Last time it was done in November 2012. No problem.

Miroc

LZTR, Slovakia

Seems LBA has changed a lot. Are they more relaxed now?

United Kingdom
9 Posts
Sign in to add your message

Back to Top