These reporters write such bollocks. They are clueless…
That’s a bit harsh. MY plane is now under the care of SAC, and I certainly couldn’t tell you the difference between a trust and beneficial ownership. I just cross my fingers and hope it all works.
Airborne_Again wrote:
If the prosecution had to dig up that rule, they have to be desperate.
Not desperate, just efficient. By using this rule the court in some cases can avoid that they have to do an evaluation based on a foreign law in a different legal system that neither the court not the parties are really familiar with.
Airborne_Again wrote:
If the prosecution had to dig up that rule, they have to be desperate
I am inclined to think the lack of AOC would have been the main charge, say the accident happened in G-reg (Art104) but it was probably easy to prosecute under Art250 as lack of AOC/permission is default case for N-reg as Malibuflyer said
Strictly speaking the flight was departing in French airspace, only the destination in UK but the crash was in Channel Islands which belong to UK airspace….
Offering commercial transport and public transport flights (Art104)
Restriction on carriage in foreign registered aircraft (Art250)
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2016/765/article/104
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2016/765/article/250
That’s not really the AOC requirement, is it?
That states that you need the permission of the Secretary of State; or the CAA, if carrying paying passengers.
The rule enables one to get a simple permission for ad-hoc “aerial work” – like this.
Now, let’s say you tell them you want to be doing this regularly. Or perhaps you bought some business with a load of orange-painted A320s. They will come back and say you need an AOC 
The details of what exactly needs an AOC, what the conditions are, how much, etc, are not published AFAIK, and every country is different, which is why you get weird ops like one in Ireland which crashes and then people ask why it was running under a Spanish AOC. Or why Netjets use a Portugese AOC.
That is obviously how it works in every other country too. Differences might be that some may not issue ad-hoc permissions at all (“AOC for everything to do with €€€”) and some won’t care if the “ad-hoc” really is “ad hoc” i.e. you keep a low profile and don’t p1ss off anybody important (a country not far from here runs like that).
AFAIK the origin of this stuff goes back many decades, to do with aerial photography, which is pretty much explicitly prohibited everywhere under some ICAO provision, although most 1st World countries don’t actually care anymore.
and I certainly couldn’t tell you the difference between a trust and beneficial ownership. I just cross my fingers and hope it all works.
Make sure you make a full disclosure to SAC of who is flying 
My son can now fly my TB20 and I gave them all the details. They will ask for a copy of your insurance policy.
SAC are the trustee. You are the beneficial owner. In US-speak you are the trustor.
If the prosecution had to dig up that rule, they have to be desperate.
One would hope, rather than “desperate”, they learnt a lesson from the Hunter crash pilot getting acquitted (despite 57.4% of the UK GDP having been spent writing up a 10,000 page accident report) and now they will be trying to climb Mt Snowdon and succeed, rather than try to climb Everest and freeze to death
I can’t remember, but did this accident happen before Brexit?
If so could the rule posted by @bookworm be referencing cabotage in this case?
Ie an American owned aircraft picking up a passenger in France and flying them to the UK.
If it had been a UK aircraft IMO that charge would not stick under that regulation.YMMV
AIUI, cabotage is not exempted by EU membership.
It was previously threatened by some official in France. Lots of people got quite worried back then (on the basis of “guilty because you can’t prove innocence” and nobody will argue with a 9mm carrying official) and eventually somebody pressed the head of French police to produce that letter.
Cabotage is the carriage of paying passengers within a country which is not the country of the aircraft reg, and is enabled by EU fair trade law (so e.g. Easyjet could not be blocked from flying say Paris to Munich, purely on the grounds of cabotage, which is why they have now moved the planes used for those routes to the Austrian registry) but paying passenger flights (whether charter or scheduled) still need an AOC, and scheduled flights need various “political quid pro quo” stuff like airport gate space mutual deals which are done under the table.
Sure, somebody flying a provably paying passenger France to UK would be doing cabotage, but I guess the CAA wanted to bust the operator (AIUI the operator is the pilot under Part NCO, but the pilot is dead in this case) for “something” and they need to do it without French participation because that would add a whole other dimension to the difficulty. It is also possible that France didn’t want to be involved; historically they have not been interested in visible revenue ops in N-regs so long as nothing bad happens (no; I am not going to post details, even though they are widely known). There is already the fact (as in FAA Chief Counsel’s statement) that a 61.75 does include night privileges even if the underlying license does not – a point missed by the press, the AAIB, and almost everybody else…
There is already the fact (as in FAA Chief Counsel’s statement) that a 61.75 does include night privileges even if the underlying license does not
That Chief Counsel interpretation (Krausz) is inconsistent with the statutory requirement at 49 USC 40105(b) for FAA to act consistently with international agreements, eg to respect the standard in ICAO Annex 1, para 2.3.2.2 “Before exercising the privileges at night, the licence holder shall have received dual instruction in aircraft within the appropriate category of aircraft in night flying, including take-off, landing and navigation.”
Also, a 61.75 (this is from one issued today) states this
But it will make a prosecution under this heading awfully difficult, because – in any civilised country – any ambiguity is construed in favour of the defendant.
According to an article in the Daily Mail, with the following photo and caption, this 
is the plane that is now in the bottom of the channel.
Very strange considering that I was flying it this afternoon.
What recourse do I have against the newspaper, especially given that my aircraft is currently for sale.
Qalupalik wrote:
That Chief Counsel interpretation (Krausz) is inconsistent with the statutory requirement at 49 USC 40105(b) for FAA to act consistently with international agreements, eg to respect the standard in ICAO Annex 1, para 2.3.2.2 “Before exercising the privileges at night, the licence holder shall have received dual instruction in aircraft within the appropriate category of aircraft in night flying, including take-off, landing and navigation.”
that’s a very low bar, and like many pilots with some experience he could probably tick that box. He may have been competent to fly at night under the FAA system and meet the ICAO requirement, though this is probably all a distraction because it wasn’t ideal night VFR conditions…
