According to this news report in German, a Swiss small aircraft owner and pilot had been fined in 2015 by the Swiss FOCA for forgetting to enter 17 flights from 2011 and 2012 into the aircraft’s logbook. This was discovered when the logbook was compared to the aircraft movement logs of the airports of Zurich and Friedrichshafen.
The pilot went to court, stating that he had forgotten to make these entries after some stressful flights when he intended to do these after coming home, but later forgot to make the entries. The court of first instance judged him to a fine of 4000 CHF, stating that these entries were the basis for aircraft maintenance. The pilot appealed the ruling based on the argument that the applicable maintenance intervals had all been respected despite the missing entries in the logbook. The appeals court lowered the fine to 850 CHF on the basis that it thought it was wrong to count this as 17 instances of misdoing, and it should be seen as one. The pilot will appeal this ruling as well to the Swiss federal court according to the article.
The photo in the article shows an N-reg plane, but it also says “Symbolic image”. I guess had he been on the N register, this could not have happened…
Interesting, I wonder why this was investigated in the first place. I get the sense there’s more to this story than presented here.
Maybe he tried to sell it?
But the tach would show the hours. This is a fine for paperwork!
I get the sense there’s more to this story than presented here.
PROB100.
He made an enemy somewhere, for sure. Maybe he sold a plane which the buyer found full of worms (a pretty standard situation) and wanted revenge. But 17 flights is probably not many hours, so this must have been a very low-time plane, so a logbook v. tach discrepancy was obvious. For example I log airborne time (100% legit) for maintenance so the tach never matches.
I know somebody (two actually) who got hit by the tax authorities and they went through airport logs as evidence of flights booked to a business. But it would surprise me if a tax investigation was widened to a CAA or whatever one.
Not necessarily. Im Germany, we have the dreaded so called ACAM inspections, where the LBA just randomly picks an aircraft on the D-reg. and “takes it apart”, including the paperwork. I guess the FOCA has some similar scheme?
Peter wrote:
He made an enemy somewhere, for sure.
I wouldn’t be so sure either. Every aircraft owner is the enemy here, so to speak. 
Not necessarily. Im Germany, we have the dreaded so called ACAM inspections, where the LBA just randomly picks an aircraft on the D-reg. and “takes it apart”, including the paperwork. I guess the FOCA has some similar scheme?
Maybe. (But ACAM is really nothing to worry about, I have had two of those already. Less than 30 minutes and very friendly and competent inspectors. Totally different from a SAFA inspection in France.)
But it could also have been his maintenance organisation who raised the alarm. Seeing his aircraft move from time to time but nothing in the books. After all, it it their signatures which declare the aircraft airworthy.
Tach reading is irrelevant in older aircraft. Good for the Authority. I hope the original sentence is replaced at the appeal.
We bought an aircraft which had only logged 7 hours in the summer before we bought it. When I met an instructor at that field, he said he’d heard it almost every day. We had two strip-downs before we got the engine fixed.
