Also, Switzerland has a preferential tariff of 0% anyway.
in blissful ignorance of the aforementioned customs regulations, without any issues.
i.e. was lucky. Clearly, he could easily ended up in the same situation as the pilot subject of this thread. Breaking a law without getting caught doesn‘t make it legal. 
Agree about the FUD. That‘s what results in the recommendation to always land at an AOE…if one wants to be certain.
Zorg wrote:
“third-country duty” is 0%
Problem is not customs/tariff but import VAT.
The “opinion” cited by Lionel, that a glider on a trailer is no longer a means of transportation (which will be imported into the union for temporary use by just passing an official customs point rather than having to be declared as for temporary import is interesting if not questionable.
BUT: As the original case shows, we are talking thousands of EUR here. A call to the customs office in my opinion is not too much of an effort to get clarity instead of guessing. As you did! And yes, the answer you got is not what we would have hoped for – but we can still try to get another binding statement from customs or just comply with what we have now.
Personally I only fly through official customs airports when I fly from/to Switzerland – even if it might include a detour. I am, however, in the fortunate situation, that my Homebase is such a customs airfield.
Right, the German 19% VAT is the main culprit. So even for a cheap glider (say EUR 30-50k), customs expect a private person to deposit by cash or credit card EUR 6’000-10’000. WTF!
When driving on the motorway in Switzerland in spring, you can see a lot of glider trailers with mostly German plates, possibly on the way to the French Alps. It’s hard to believe that they all go through this process with Swiss customs, or are aware that such a rule / procedure (temporary importation) even exists also with Swiss customs.
There seems to be a lot of murky stuff with customs which screws with unwitting harmless citizens. For instance, from time to time there are media reports about some poor chap (Swiss resident) who either borrowed a car from family or friend abroad, or took a rental car from the French (Geneva) or German (Basel) side of the airport into Switzerland. Upon a border check they are found to “illegally import” this vehicle into Switzerland, and are made to pay customs duty + VAT + a fine for their borrowed car. Here is a (German-language) article about a similar case of a German guy driving with a borrowed Swiss car into Austria.
Zorg wrote:
For instance, from time to time there are media reports about some poor chap (Swiss resident) who either borrowed a car from family or friend abroad, or took a rental car from the French (Geneva) or German (Basel) side of the airport into Switzerland.
I have done that by mistake many times between St-Louis & Bale on a rental car, funny enough Europe Car at the airport had their rental park split by the border and you have to bring the car to one side not the other, google map shows you the shortest route to get to the airport but the rental desk want us to use another route, the desk guy was the same but had two doors to each car park 
There was a 40% difference on similar car rental prices depending if you choose CHF or EUR !
Seems like a lot of people fall into this trap. From the above article:
The case of Dieter Johann von der Heide is not an isolated case. “In the district of the main customs office Lörrach we had about 50 such cases last year alone”, confirms the spokesman of the customs office Lörrach.
50 cases per year, and only for one customs office amongst several at the border to Switzerland. I’m wondering whether the French and Italian customs enforcement of this stuff is similar, or they just ignore it?
It sounds like they are hitting maybe 50 Swiss people a year, 10k+ each. That’s nice business.
So how the hell can a Swiss person ever drive to Germany? Clearly they are passing a proper Customs post on the road. So who are these 50 people and what are they doing that’s different?
These 50 (alleged) “convicts” are apparently badd enough to engage in the criminal activity of (alleged) “vehicle smuggling”, by having the audacity of driving (as EU-resident) with a Swiss-registered (typically borrowed) vehicle into Germany.
Likewise, the same applies for Switzerland, if you take the above sentence, and apply the following string replacements:
:-)
When you cross the Swiss-German/French/Italian/Austrian border by car, mostly you just get waved through without any interaction with a border agent. (Otherwise, there would be even more insane traffic jams than there already are during some times of the week.) Someone unaware of these customs regulations might simply make it through the border unharmed for quite a long time. Checks are cursory, and so the rate of 50 cases per year suggests (think Poisson process) that there is a much larger number of such “illegal border crossings”, most likely out of ignorance on the side of the driver. (For instance, I didn’t learn about this until after more than a decade of crossing the border.)
Peter wrote:
So how the hell can a Swiss person ever drive to Germany? Clearly they are passing a proper Customs post on the road. So who are these 50 people and what are they doing that’s different?
The cases discussed here are German (or other EU) residents driving Swiss cars (i.e. cars registered in Switzerland) that do not belong to themselves but are borrowed from someone else from Switzerland into Germany/the European customs union. That’s quite a special case.
Swiss residents driving their own car is a completely different (and very simple) thing.
Peter wrote:
So how the hell can a Swiss person ever drive to Germany? Clearly they are passing a proper Customs post on the road. So who are these 50 people and what are they doing that’s different?
Peter,
this is a totally different case and it should be known well enough to prevent such occurrences.
In short: it is illegal to cross a border into the EU with a Non EU licensed car if you reside in the EU without declaring the car. Vice versa, it is illegal to cross the border to Switzerland as a Swiss resident in a non Swiss licenced car without declaring it. If you do declare it, you have the possibility to either pay VAT and duty as applicable or to get a transit paper which needs to be stamped on exit within a pre-defined short period of time, at least that is what I got told. If you fail to declare it, VAT and duty as applicable will be payable immediately.
The same btw goes for aeroplanes. If as a Swiss resident you wish to fly in an airplane with non-Swiss register into Switzerland, you need to declare it and pay customs and VAT on it, same vice versa.
This case however was different. It was a Swiss resident with a swiss registered plane and he got busted for using an airport which had customs only under special conditions which nobody concerned (pilot, police, airport staff) appeared to understand.
