UK CAA consultation on cost sharing flights

CAA response CAP2391
CAP2391 local copy

Significant topics:

• no advertising allowed unless flight was going to be done anyway i.e. no input allowed from passengers
• record keeping requirements
• a common purpose rule (the CAA will not be doing this one)

No change to “direct costs” – These rules already greatly disadvantage the owner-pilot over the renter as rental costs are allowed to be off-set whereas fixed
ownership costs (hangarage, insurance, maintenance, etc) may not. So renters can continue to enjoy this advantage. Unsurprisingly, I know of almost no owner who cost-shares.

This is all due to the PA46 Sala crash. Presumably a lot of input from AOC holders and evidently from flying school owners.

The CAA admits they have almost no statistical data to base this on.

I can’t see how that is supposed to work.

If you do a flight with say 3 passengers, you can always claim afterwards that you would have done it anyway and nobody can disprove that. And if nobody responds to the advert then you can cancel it, as you say, because you had a bad night’s sleep, etc.

Or does the advert need to state the destination? The doc states Advertising will not be allowed where it results in passenger (s) dictating the destination and/or date/time of the flight, in the manner of someone chartering an aircraft. So to prosecute they would need evidence that a passenger chose the destination. It doesn’t actually say (on my reading) that the advert needs to state the destination.

There is an effect however: post-crash, an injured passenger is encouraged to lie, saying he dictated the destination. And most people will do that if there is enough money on offer.

Reading the CAA comments, it is obvious that they had loads of angry input from AOC holders (illegal charters are always a worry for them) and from some FTO owners or instructors (who want to maximise rental, and cost sharing reduces that business).

The CAA is also extremely sensitive to having any dirty laundry washed in public e.g. the Shoreham Hunter crash, and the PA46 Sala crash. These had almost nothing to do with the GA community, but they made the CAA look bad.

The unfortunate thing is that few aircraft owners are cost sharing; most cost sharing is done by the poorest members of the GA community, of which most will not do a flight at all unless they can cost-share it.

I think they more or less have done that.

The tricky bit with the pre-EASA regs was that, paraphrasing, the flight could be advertised only within a club, and all cost sharing people had to be club members. It was never clarified whether this “club” could be a website, and obviously the CAA never wanted to go to a court on that because losing the case creates a precedent, and the CAA absolutely hates creating precedents. They much prefer to use FUD (basically, the natural tendency of pilots to obey laws, both real and imagined ones) to self-police. IMHO, a website club would have been “ok” if the CAA had chosen to litigate on it.

This produced a load of “seat sharing” websites, which were cost sharing sites in all but name. The flight would not have been done if you didn’t want to pay.

So nothing is going to change – except the forms to fill in.

The EASA rules, pilot needing to pay just 1p and no advert restrictions, really surprised me, but they were only based on what some country already had (Germany?) and the EASA committee could not proceed without that country’s agreement.

This is from FTN – a training industry flyer:

Last I heard the CAA told somebody they decided to not do major changes, however.

The CAA is running another consultation.

I’ve just done it. It is similar to the previous but IIRC much more brief. Probably the CAA is on a fishing trip hoping to get a shift in opinion so they can revert to the old UK system; this objective is obvious from the questions. It’s a bit like those countries which ran the EU-joining or Euro-joining referendum multiple times until they got the desired result