Wingly - illegal with an N-reg?

My view is that it is illegal for flights that cross country borders, i.e. flights that cannot be performed with an EASA license on an N-reg.

autorouter has integration for Wingly but does not display the section for flights with N-reg that cross borders.

FAA are generally not in favor of this non-common-purpose cost sharing but the real restriction is in the FARs where it concerns pilot privileges. Those do not apply when pilot the aircraft on an EASA license which is possible within the country where the EASA license was issued.

This is my interpretation of the legal situation.

One reason to have an EASA-reg aircraft.

Cost sharing is potentially illegal in an N reg due to

• FAA Common Purpose Rule

• UK airspace needs CAA permission, which you cannot get for this

It is an interesting theory that if you fly an N-reg on an EASA license (permitted by FAR 61.3) then the Common Purpose rule does not apply. If true, it would work only if you are flying in the airspace owned by the country which issued the EASA license, so e.g. a pilot who held FAA papers and German issued EASA papers could do Wingly in German airspace only.

But you still can’t do any cost sharing in UK airspace.

Also I bet you anything that other countries apart from the UK have laws on remunerated ops in N-regs. Otherwise, the entire flight training business in all of Europe would be N-reg, but (except in some far corners) none of them are. The main difference is that in most countries nobody knows about the regs, or it is a country where anything is possible provided you don’t p1ss off anybody big, whereas in the UK there have been some high profile prosecutions so everybody in GA knows about this (used to be Artile 115, later 223, no idea which one it is in the current ANO).

To add to the above post

• The FAA “holding out” rule may apply. This does not say that doing a flight for nothing is an exemption although one would hope that a free flight would be ok

So Wingly can’t be used even for finding free passengers.

I emailed them a few days ago asking if the pilot data is visible to Google. No reply…

Peter wrote:

The FAA “holding out” rule may apply. This does not say that doing a flight for nothing is an exemption although one would hope that a free flight would be ok

This is correct, Peter, it would most definitely apply to something like Wingly. IIRC the only exception to this in FAA-land are flights conducted during a charitable event (e.g. airport open day, fundraisers and such).

172driver wrote:

This is correct, Peter, it would most definitely apply to something like Wingly. IIRC the only exception to this in FAA-land are flights conducted during a charitable event (e.g. airport open day, fundraisers and such).

Well, the question is if it applies outside of FAA-land when the flight later on is conducted with an N-reg plane…

@Patrick, my reply was in response to Peter’s comment. As for a flight conducted outside FAA-land on a non-FAA license, I would think @achimha is correct with his interpretation. However, just as a little mind game: what if you hold both an EASA and FAA license? Is this interpretation then still valid?

172driver wrote:

However, just as a little mind game: what if you hold both an EASA and FAA license? Is this interpretation then still valid?

I suppose for any border-crossing flight, you would have to conduct the flight “using” your FAA license. For a flight within the country (where your EASA license is issued), it gets a bit tricky indeed.