From a tax perspective you are a resident if you spend at least 6 months and one day in the country. How EASA defines a resident does not seem to be clear to anyone.
From a tax perspective you are a resident if you spend at least 6 months and one day in the country. How EASA defines a resident does not seem to be clear to anyone.
That varies by country. For example if you are in the UK and want to become a tax resident on the IOM you have to be out there for something like 3 years. There are strict rules on how often you can visit the mainland during each of those years. I know one fresh IOM resident (not on here) who even takes “cheap” flights to Dublin and stays in the cheapest hotel he can find overnight and flies back in the morning, to earn an extra day out of the IOM. I am sure someone here can fill in the details…
Tax residence is a complex field in which you find some very highly paid accountants. The UK also has the benefit for well drafted laws, with few ambiguities, which mainland Europe doesn’t seem to have for the most part. Look at the bollox in various EASA FCL regs for example.
I asked the head of CAA licensing whether he knows what meaning EASA intended, and whether EASA has given them any guidance, and he said NO. That isn’t surprising at all. The regulation is either incompetently done (in a Cologne bar) or a deliberate piece of FUD, so they were never in a position to clarify anything. It certainly was put together as a “private project” of about 4 people at EASA. Many others in there were concerned at the time that it was likely to cause a lot of problems and torpedo the more worthwhile stuff EASA was going to do, and that is pretty well what has happened. EASA is now seen as a subject of ridicule by most of aviation, not just GA.
Aviathor wrote:
From a tax perspective you are a resident if you spend at least 6 months and one day in the country. How EASA defines a resident does not seem to be clear to anyone.
Lucky for me I rarely spend more than 4 weeks continuously in country (Hungary). If they the Hungarian Govt decide to tax our foreign income NOBODY would return to Hungary that left as a dissident during the communist rule. There are 10s of thousands of us that came back bringing a lot of money with us. The political class is very smart and know a poor country can only be raped so much before new blood is needed to feed their avarice.
By political class Im not limiting my statement only to Hungary. It includes the sacrosanct EU brotherhood as well as the rapists in Washington.
Typically, to spend more than 90 days in the EU in any 180 day period you need something more in terms of a visa or citizenship than entry as a tourist. I think that will be perceived as the clearest criterion for being established as a ‘operator’ in the EU when flying your own plane, if the law ever comes into effect.
It’s obviously a totally ambiguous and amateur law that in its intent reminds me of the Berlin Wall, but if you produce an EU passport as ID, I think you’re going to have a tougher argument. For somebody holding non-EU citizenship and producing a non-EU passport my only concern personally would be stamps in the non-EU passport indicating admission to the EU under a residence visa – but I think you’d likely make a policeman go away by producing an FAA pilot certificate, non-EU passport and perhaps some supporting documentation like a current drivers license or other ID with a non-EU home address. Using two passports and keeping a non-EU passport visa stamp free would also provide a possible solution to that issue, if you’ve got them.
Just my opinion, I won’t in any case be establishing official EU residence in the forseeable future. Ninety days or less is enough for me, and stuff like this inevitably makes that more the case.
C210_Flyer wrote:
So every FAA licensed pilot from the US who happens to have a second home or apartment in Europe has his own plane now has to have EASA License also?
Yes, basically EASA is sticking up their middle finger to the US. This article from 2012 puts it nicely (even though a bit dramatized).
Rwy20 wrote:
Yes, basically EASA is sticking up their middle finger to the US
That’s not true in my opinion.
What they are really among at are European resident individuals or companies that are using foreign registers, for example a Frenchman with an N reg Cirrus, or a UK Company with a Caymen reg Citation.
They are NOT aiming at visitors, or US Airlines flying into Frankfurt or Heathrow, or Russian businessmen flying their Gulfstreams.
Perhaps if EASA got its house in order, there would be no need for EU citizens to resort to flags of convenience. I am beginning to doubt the wisdom of keeping my own machine on the G-reg.
It’s much easier for EASA to use an iron fist to crush the rebels.
Sorry… I was channelling Darth Vader there. 
Neil wrote:
They are NOT aiming at visitors, or US Airlines flying into Frankfurt or Heathrow, or Russian businessmen flying their Gulfstreams.
From the example given it is that someone comes here for more than a few weeks as on a job assignment for longer than 6 months they want that person to have an EU license whatever the hell that is. There is no reciprocity between countries and they want to bust your shoes into spending a stupid fortune to get an inane Lic and certificate.
Fortunately for me I do more than pattern flying so in not locked into a local one country location and am still a resident of the US. I have a lot of temporary addresses. But I can see where this shit is going to cause a whole lot of people headaches. With the end result being a lot fewer pilots and a lot fewer airplanes and a lot less airports. I guess not too many 50-70 year olds will take up hang gliding. So as the pilot population gets smaller what they want or need will mean less to the politicians.
By the way I renewed my AOPA membership and gave an almost equal amount to our Political Action Fund. Now when we give our US politicians money over the table, please dont call that corruption because the politicians made that kind of transaction legal.
Have my earlier comments on govt given any inkling that I hate the political class and their institutions?
They are NOT aiming at visitors, or US Airlines flying into Frankfurt or Heathrow, or Russian businessmen flying their Gulfstreams.
Well, they can’t do those anyway. AOC airline ops are governed by international deals, etc. International bizjet aviation is also “free”, in the civilised world.
The EASA FCL stuff is a political move, which takes Europe back to being an African country where such and such is possible and such and such is not possible, but such and such is not written down anywhere…
Perhaps if EASA got its house in order, there would be no need for EU citizens to resort to flags of convenience. I am beginning to doubt the wisdom of keeping my own machine on the G-reg.
Post-Sivel and post-Goudot EASA is listening a lot more now but IMHO it will never change the basic European principles which have lead to the N-reg (etc) scene e.g. organisational approvals (rather than individual approvals) and where the organisations pay a licensing fee to the CAA, so the whole boat is kept afloat by an artificial system which relies on payments from the people being regulated. It’s not a stable system (in the GA case) because as the payers shrink, the charges have to go up, so the payers shrink more. And the decay becomes exponential. But that is “Europe” – I see the same crap in other regulatory areas not related to aviation.
From the example given it is that someone comes here for more than a few weeks as on a job assignment for longer than 6 months they want that person to have an EU license whatever the hell that is
That is one scenario where EASA FCL is not going to make any sense, ever…
Rwy20 wrote:
Yes, basically EASA is sticking up their middle finger to the US.
I do not agree with that characteristic. It may simply be a (legitimate) desire to conduct oversight of pilots in Europe. If there was a significant amount of EASA reg airplanes in the US, it is likely that the americans would want the same thing.
C210_Flyer wrote:
There is no reciprocity between countries and they want to bust your shoes into spending a stupid fortune to get an inane Lic and certificate.
In all fairness this measure has been postponed over and over again since it made it into the basic regulation in order to have a clear path for US license (or certificate) holders to obtain EASA licenses based on their US license, in other words that the negociations concerning the licensing annex of US-EU BASA have been finalised. That is at least how I interpret it.
So it is definitely not a birdie to the US
