Echobeach - you have a PM with references etc.
There is enough meat in the GA rumour mill to enable someone to get a PhD on the back of a case study (always a popular way to do a PhD) on the psychology here.
The threat to the foreign reg (in the main, N-reg although bigger iron tends to also be on the Cayman etc registers) has been there over decades and far longer than I have been flying.
GA has many people who have worked for X hours towards a qualification Y and it is human nature to despise those tho have got Y with less than X. I see this in my business (electronics) where some company has developed a product to meet some EU requirement, and then the requirement is relaxed, or exemptions appear, and other can take advantage of those, and the company them starts putting out press releases all over the place (and directly lobbying the EU) saying how this is "unfair" etc etc. The axe grinders can always be spotted from miles away.
In aviation, the test is SAFETY and there is NO data showing foreign reg planes are less safe. Studies have been specially commissioned to dig out such data (e.g. the DfT asked the CAA to dig some out, a few years ago) but all were unsuccessful.
The threat has varied over recent years. The French tried to put a long term parking limit on N-reg c. 2004 but dropped it fast, amid industry and other protests.
The Brits tried the same in 2005, with a 90-day long term parking ban, and dropped it likewise.
Forgetting rumours, the
current threat picture comprises of
this proposal (see pages 159-161). In brief, this strips
EU resident (the term is not defined - various precedents include residence for tax purposes for example) pilots of foreign license privileges while in EU airspace.
If you think this is aggressive, well it is. It would wipe out most of the light jet scene in Europe, and is therefore impossible to achieve as it stands, on obvious political grounds. EASA's "grand plan" is to eventually sign
treaties with other countries (the USA, notably) for mutual acceptance or validation of licenses. This proposal is aggressive, to bring the other countries to the table.
The basic problem with all this regulation is that under ICAO if you have a license/rating and a plane all from the came country, you have worldwide privileges and no civilised country can mess with that. The previous proposals, and this latest one too, all suffer from the unavoidable problem that no matter what is done locally, "genuine foreigners" will always be able to come into Europe and fly as per their ICAO privileges! But, on any of these proposals, the locals cannot. The result is a weird aviation scene with a lot of unenforceable but effective work-arounds e.g. firing your jet crew and replacing them with ones who are not EU resident... If EASA owned the whole world things would be very different but it owns only a little tiny bit of it.
There is another proposal in the pipeline, applicable to foreign
airframes, whose contents is currently unknown. It is due out in the next few weeks.
However, while it is possible for EASA to attack European citizens without breaching ICAO (because ICAO allows a State to prevents its own citizens from exercising the privileges of a foreign license in its airspace) an attack against airframes is much more difficult because it would need to work on some kind of long term parking limit and this is a tough one, for several reasons, one being that the maintenance business would be all but wiped out because no owner will use up his long term parking entitlement by having the plane sitting in a hangar in the EU having its Annual!
I recommend two things:
1) Draw the attention of any high-end aircraft owner to the above URL for the EASA FCL proposal and encourage any interested party to make their representations on the form provided. There are sure to be many thousands doing this, but the really useful ones will be those made at the higher political levels - as always.
2) Do not do any action pro-actively in reaction to this proposal. It is much too early.
For example, under the old long term parking proposals, some owners went from N-reg back to G-reg which cost them thousands and stripped them of IFR privileges. They did this out of pure fear. This is plain stupid. These proposals change all the time and, as I said, the end objective is a treaty with the USA. EASA does not actually want to kill the light/corporate jet scene!! The threat picture will clarify over the next few years and one should do nothing in the meantime.
I would recommend obtaining any cheap insurances; for example avoid doing mods to your plane which would have to be expensively ripped out under EASA. A backup oil pressure gauge might cost £5000 to recertify under EASA but this is not the end of the world, and it could be a lot less, and it may be possible to placard it INOP (a traditional solution which the CAA did on my TB20 because they didn't like the prop TKS)... And a registry transfer may be completely unnecessary in the end! Getting the CAA Class 1 medical is another good one; the initial only costs £300 now and provided you renew every 5 years or less it locks you into Demonstrated Ability for life, which could one day be priceless, and it will certainly be good enough for any future IR requirements. But the Class 2 won't be because of e.g. the audiogram requirement. Think long term!