When you walk the corridors of power often enough you get a feeling of what is going on
That's very true; however it's also true that in any large regulatory organisation 100% of the people, right down to the tea ladies, will have a very firm opinion on everything under the sun, and will claim to have all kinds of connections, yet only about 1% of them are actual policymakers.
If you speak to a lot of ATCOs at West Drayton you come out convinced that the CAA will ban all single pilot jets, and that private IFR (non-ATPL) flying is finished. Is this likely? Not at all.
If you speak to CAA/Dft people privately you get the impression that they will kick out N-reg planes "this year". I was told this absolutely by these people, on the phone, in 2004/2005. Did it happen? No. In fact, it appears that there was never the slightest chance of it happening. Too many people with N-reg jets knowing too many people in the corridors of power (and I don't mean in the DfT or the CAA) and that's before you get onto top-level political issues. Very little information has ever come out on what really happened (which itself is telling) but the indications are that the subject is more sensitive than anybody here would believe.
That said, I do think that foreign reg ops in Europe will probably end one day. But, to achieve this, EASA will have to offer a substantial carrot:
- swap of a FAA IR for an EASA IR (there could be some devil in the detail, and an FAA PPL/IR may not get full EASA IR privileges, well not perhaps just like that)
- acceptance of FAA Type Certificates, STCs and 337s (politically this is hard to swallow in Europe, but one can work out a system which is de facto equivalent while avoiding the dreaded 3-letter word ("FAA"). This must be retrospective otherwise a few thousand planes would need to be modified or exported out of EASA-land.
- acceptance of ICAO medical requirements, not gold plated, for private flight
Everything will end one day. One day we will all be dead. But before that, our local airfield will close to developers; that will stop far more people flying than EASA. Before that, we will lose our hangar spaces; that will stop a lot of people operating half decent planes....
The name of the game is to keep one step ahead and keep all the options open, and that is what the decision is about.