I think the main difference here is that the UK is a very old country, not invaded since 1066, and it runs old legal traditions, which have been well shaken down over centuries, whereas mainland Europe has had loads of wars, invasions, civil wars, legal system changes, etc, and arguably has not had the time and the stability to develop a really robust justice system.
This is the opinion of an aviation barrister I used to know, but even to me it seems that the UK allows a lot of stuff which you could not do on the mainland in terms of where you can land a plane and such like.
Also EASA regs seem to be written in impenetrable code and that is assuming you can actually find the currently applicable bit which is a whole separate branch of human endeavour 
The UK ANO is written badly enough in a lot of places though, with a long string of overlapping restrictive clauses with unclear and/or language.
Peter wrote:
One “can” do a lot of things within the EU / within EASA, so long as what you do is not provocative enough, plus you (as a country) is a powerful enough member (France, Germany, etc), or you are a small country but a symbolically important one which the EU would not want to alienate and eventually lose (e.g. Greece doing a grexit, or even just leaving the Euro, would be a massive hit to Brussels’ prestige).
Off-topic, but that is not at all how the EU works. It is – more than any other polity in the world – bound by the rule of law. Wheter you are a big or a small country is legally completely irrelevant.
In this case, as often discussed here on EuroGA, the regulatory regime of EASA is often not the problem, but its more restrictive interpretation by national CAAs.
So if someone lands there anyway, under what law are they prosecuted?
From the Daily Telegraph, 20/11/2020:
Jacko wrote:
So if someone lands there anyway, under what law are they prosecuted?
So apparently there was a law against landing there. What, then, is the problem?
I find it difficult to imagine that near a 16000ft summit there would be a sufficiently large number of people “walking to the summit” to warrant Police attendance at all.
I don’t think there’s much point behind SEP and SET being different classes. A PA-46-nnnTP is far closer to a PA-46-nnnP than either of those to a C172, an Antonov An2, an SR22T or a TB20. There’s no good reason for recency for passenger carriage to carry over from a C172 to a PA-46-nnnP, SR22T, and from a C208 to a C10T or PC12 but not from a PA-46-nnnTP to a PA-46-nnnP, nor from a P210 to a C10T.
It should all be one happy class, with differences training between variants. I see no inherent bigger step going from a normally aspirated piston to a light turbine than from NA piston to a turbocharged piston.
It would also solve the weirdness that I need differences training to go from a C172 with steam gauges to a C172 with EFIS, but not from a C10T with steam gauges to a C10T with EFIS. Or difference training going from a fixed-gear C182 to a R182 (retractable gear variant), but not from a C06T to a C10T. Things would just fall in: if you already have RG variant from flying a R182, you’d need only familiarisation from C06T to C10T. Else, you’d need to pass the RG variant differences training.
Symmetrically, right now, I have a Cessna SET rating (Cessna P210N Silver Eagle variant; C10T ICAO code) and a SEP rating with EFIS, VP, RU and T variants. It doesn’t make sense I cannot get into a piston P210 without undergoing difference training for the P (cabin pressurisation) variant of “Single-engine piston (land)”. Again, if it were the same class, things would just fall through logically:
“I think the main difference here is that the UK is a very old country, not invaded since 1066”
Scottish Law is different from English Law. Scotland was invaded many times after 1066, when it wasn’t invaded.
The name UK is indicative.
And Northern Ireland is UK Airspace but not part of the UK.
The need for landowners permission to land makes the UK similar to the Mont Blanc situation -who owns the summit?
PS is there a cable car to it?
PPS someone deliberately landed and damaged an aircraft on Cairngorm summit in the 60s. (The Strathallan founder?) I remember seeing them taking it down while skiing there. There wasn’t a prosecution as far as I remember.
Maoraigh wrote:
And Northern Ireland is UK Airspace but not part of the UK.
It is not? Doesn’t “UK” mean “The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland”?
Northern Ireland is part of the UK.
You might be thinking of the crown dependencies like the Isle of Man. However, Isle of Man airspace, while it is in the London FIR is Manx airspace, not UK airspace, and has its own ANO. In practise this doesn’t really affect things very much since the Isle of Man harmonises with the UK on airspace etc., but there are some differences (such as the volcanic ash incident, when the Isle of Man controversially grounded absolutely everything, including gliders).
(my emphasis)So apparently there was a law against landing there.
No, the law was/is against landing anywhere which is not an officially permitted aerodrome/altisurface.
In other words, if you see a nice field or glacier or beach or lake in most of EASAland the neo-totalitarian default is that it is forbidden to land there, regardless of any bylaws or landowner’s permission.
To a British citizen (or indeed anyone living elsewhere than the EU, DPRK or PRC) this seems a flagrant breach of the right to the peaceful enjoyment of one’s possessions – a right so diluted in the EU Charter and the European Convention, that it is effectively denied.
