Agreed!
If you don’t have turbine or turbojet time FSI will prob limit you to SIC which you then upgrade to PIC on your next renewal.
Interesting you are relying on charter utilisation to pay for the AOC fees. A colleague in the business reckons that is a difficult balancing trick. The basic issue is that the utilisation cannot be assured to any extent at all.
I know another pilot who worked for a firm which had half its fleet lent to them by owners, in a similar way. It is not an unusual arrangement.
what_next wrote:
AFAIK this is a thing of the past. There used to be a 5.7ton limit, but no more so with EASA (and JAR before that). The limitation with a PPL is the certification category: Single pilot type- or classratings (or part 23 aircraft like this CitationJet) can be entered in any license. Multi pilot types (part 25) require a CPL/ATPL. But I guess there are the usual national exceptions and special provisions. In any case, an HPA rating is required in order to fly that jet.I know you need a CRM course, but do you really need a CPL? Well, not that I doubt you, but I’d like to read this myself. Do you know where this requirement is written?
What is going to be more interesting is how a private pilot will be able to fly this plane once it is under an AOC. In EASA land, jets require two pilots in order to be operated commercially, both of which must have a commercial license, no matter if they are part 23 or part 25 aircraft. If a private pilot owner wants to fly his aicraft himself, it has to be removed from the AOC first and put back under the AOC before the next commercial operation.
Even if the flight is a non-commercial flight? Does that mean that AOC holders have to apply part-CAT even to, say, positioning flights?
@Peter
We don’t actually need income from the Charter but the AOC with mosttly overseas journeys enables import as a Qualifying Aircraft, hence no vat payable, the other M2 they have did 200 hours charter this year so getting 100+ I think not a problem and it will save cash of course:)
We dry lease the aircraft for charter.BTW
Reduces our costs and pays for management CAMO etc, fully managed for us and other pilots available as required. Negotiated fuel and handling rates, CAA burden taken off our shoulders. Its the only way really IMHO
Originally we were just going to run it privately, prob on an M reg, but its the £500k vat that kills that avenue
@Airborne Again
The other M2 owner flies privately on a PPL IR ME (and type of course), like us he has a commercial pilot for charters and pulls another one from the operators pool.
@WhatNext
If a private pilot owner wants to fly his aicraft himself, it has to be removed from the AOC first and put back under the AOC before the next commercial operation.__
This is certainly not the case in UK at least
We ran our Jetranger for some years under a 3rd party AOC and conducted both private and commercial mixed operations so we have some experience of this already, its just a tech log variation.
Its been a big learning curve for us but we had substantial professional advice to get it sorted.
Congratulations – Cessna produce a fine, well engineered aircraft – is it a 2 hour sector to Alicante or less?
Will you fly SIC initially or PIC under training in the left seat with a TRI?
Having it on an AOC for the paperwork and some cost sharing seems a good idea – a lot of privately owned jets with salaried crews etc might not fly more than 200 or 300 hours.
Our pilot will fly us in this aircraft for the time being them we will see if we have the time a. Inclination to move on to self flying.
Airborne_Again wrote:
I know you need a CRM course, but do you really need a CPL? Well, not that I doubt you, but I’d like to read this myself. Do you know where this requirement is written?
I have looked briefly (but unsuccessfully…) into the EASA documents I have here on my computer regarding this question… On the internet I found the following piece of regulation quoted by a training provider for B737 type ratings in Germany, unfortunately without references to the EASA AMCs (underscores by me):
“The trainee of the type rating course shall hold a valid class 1 medical certificate.
An applicant for the first type rating course for a multi-pilot aeroplane shall be a student pilot currently undergoing training on an MPL training course or comply with the following requirements:
- shall have sufficient knowledge of the German and / or English language to follow the training course and shall comply with the language proficiency requirements according to FCL.055
- have at least 70 hours of flight experience as PIC on aeroplanes
- hold a multi-engine IR
- have passed the ATPL(A) theoretical knowledge examinations
- hold a certificate of satisfactory completion of an MCC course in aeroplanes"
So maybe a CPL or ATPL is not really required any more. However holding a class 1 medical and having passed the ATPL theory exam without getting a CPL/ATPL from that does not make a lot of sense to me…
But as usual: Licensing is still done by EASA member states, EASA only provides guidelines. Different countries may handle it differently.
See here for Citation requirements.
In short (for EASA):
An ICAO ATPL is one means of complying with the HPA requirement, without actually doing the HPA course. Which is why everybody who may ever fly a TP or a jet should have sat the FAA ATP written exam while they had the chance 
But, IMHO, making the 14 ATPL exams mandatory is just a filter to streamline their classes and separate the real pilots from the sheep… nobody but the most determined will do these exams.
Same with the Class 1 medical.
