Zlin526
It wasn't meant to be a hook
I said "on average".
Very very few UK PPLs have a current IR. You can see the license stats on the CAA website. Most of those that do have it date back to the UK (not JAR) PPL; the JAR IRs issued to plain PPLs since JAR are miniscule.
The JAR IR has a lot more ground school than the FAA IR but most of the extra stuff is commercial stuff and is irrelevant in the PPL/GA context. The FAA flight test is by all accounts at least as hard.
It is simply that a pilot going to all the hassle of putting his plane (HIS plane usually, otherwise the N-reg option isn't available) on the N register and getting the FAA PPL/IR isn't going to be doing it to fly down the coast to Beachy Head, IFR. The aircraft registry won't determine the pilot currency but a pilot won't generally bother to do it unless he flies a lot.
I am also not saying an FAA PPL/IR does more hours than a JAR PPL/IR; just that the latter is almost extinct.
I know a fair number of people who fly regularly, long flights into Europe etc. Nearly all of them are N-reg, FAA PPL/IR.
It would take seriously perverse thinking on the CAA's part to believe that banning UK-resident N-reg planes is going to improve safety.
If they were going to do it and avoid looking ridiculous, they would need to a) offer an IR appropriate to GA flying, and b) enable an easy conversion to the new IR. They can't do a) without pan-European agreement... but of course they know all this anyway.
For larger N-reg operators, e.g. fractional schemes, there would be an obvious and trivial way around the regs: have a pool of planes and rotate them via the UK, so each one spends just under the max permitted time here. The CAA would then miss out on the really juicy CofA fees.
It doesn't look very attractive.