chflyer wrote:
The Swiss aircraft register is a good example.
It took me 15 minutes to sort everything out from Swiss register, like Sweden, Austria, France, UK and few others. Some even have the option to export register data to Excel making my life even easier.
Emir wrote:
BTW I didn’t get any comment or response to this question: What level of GDPR prevents country to publish list of registered aircrafts along with type and possibly airworthiness data without owners’ data?
Not knowing details of the EU GDPR regulation, it does seem to me that the primary focus wrt “enforcement” is in the IT space. Almost every web site in Europe (and many elsewhere) have a clause that you agreed to when you provide your email@ for a mailing list. On the other hand, there is a volume of spam that defies belief so one can wonder if the law is “catching” the low-hanging fruit (and yes, the little guy) and simply pretending that the major offenders don’t exist. Clearly, there is not a common interpretation of the law’s scope across the EU, although there is likely a common base.
As far as making personal information available publicly, Switzerland seems to concentrate on personal information that the average person would rather keep private such as medical data. Personal ownership data is often treated as being in the public domain. The Swiss aircraft register is a good example. @Emir, you certainly had an easy job in Switzerland by just entering a Diamond model ICAO code as filter and up pops a list of all such aircraft registered in Switzerland. The postal address of the owner of each, individual or corporate, is also given. Many (most?) Cantons also have a similar vehicle register. Type in a registration and up pops the owner name and address.
We’re pretty much finished, covering practically all available European registries with around 1000 Diamond aircrafts and more than 900 valid addresses. The vast majority of the aircrafts are company owned which made the task easier but some registries publish also the data of private owners (some just names, some full address).
This brings me to next stage which is finding (relatively) cheap service for printing and delivering postcards/letters across Europe. Does anyone have some suggestion? I would try to avoid country by country approach if possible.
BTW I didn’t get any comment or response to this question: What level of GDPR prevents country to publish list of registered aircrafts along with type and possibly airworthiness data without owners’ data?
Ibra wrote:
I used to fly N-reg based in UK with SAC as trust, I was surprised when some airports in Europe who don’t accept direct payments were able to pull address of “John” (the syndicate treasurer) to send him some landing & parking bills sending letter to N-reg trust guarantee delivery to the beneficial owner, few months down the road !
That is ICAO, not an ‘unofficial database’ – for rescue and billing purposes there is an exchange mechanism for airfields to get name and address of the aircraft owner.
Is it worth emailing flying magazines in various countries? They might print something in the news section free of charge. This occasionally happens in the French Info-Pilote for people doing research or setting up clubs, e.g. “x is doing y: contact them on z”. Admittedly it’s not very directional approach.
One can “find” most plane owners by googling the reg. It is usually obvious where it is based and then one can make further enquiries. But this can be a lot of legwork, so one needs a strong reason. Eurocontrol evidently do this a lot and they have compiled a database of N-reg owners and where they live.
I’ll keep you posted on final results – how many owners has been contacted and how many reacted positively or negatively to written letter addressed to company which is the owner of the aircraft. Private individuals will be contacted only if I personally know them or if they share interest via common contact (friend, service shop, aeroclub etc.)
It will be interesting to know about “unofficial databases”?
I used to fly N-reg based in UK with SAC as trust, I was surprised when some airports in Europe who don’t accept direct payments were able to pull address of “John” (the syndicate treasurer) to send him some landing & parking bills 
sending letter to N-reg trust guarantee delivery to the beneficial owner, few months down the road !
It’s easy to find aircraft owner contact if you know where it is based, just call home-base airport operation or tower and they will “pass the message”, it’s getting a structured database that looks like a challenging task…
If true this is really beyond common sense…
It is completely normal. The topic is massively misunderstood. And surrounded by wishful thinking – largely a result of Brussels’ typically heavy PR (“we are the champion of the little man”) around the legislation in its early days. Then followed a load of test cases in the courts which set the country-dependent situation. And in today’s ultra-PC world nobody wants to get caught on the wrong side of the PC debate.
The European GDPR madness has caused many US firms to IP-block European viewers, because of (false) scare stories feeding back to the US. One should be grateful that the FAA has not done that yet
