Maybe they should look at why so many are forced down the FAA track. I fail to understand how they can stipulate N reg aircraft and ban FAA IRs from being used over Europe. A mass of aircraft fly over Europe every day of the week on foreign reg and licences. You could not just not acknowlege the licences.
That's right - EASA cannot stop "genuine foreigners" flying into Europe.
Surely all they could do is to ban residents of European countries from using non JAA licences and that would be discrimination pure and simple.
What would happen with IOM reg aircraft.
IIRC, the ICAO word is "national" which means a citizenship. But there is no such thing as an "EU citizen" so EASA has adopted the word "resident". It's a bit moot since EASA can force every member state to implement its regs, anyway. ICAO does allow a member state to ban its citizens exercising the privileges of a foreign license in its airspace.
Any of these licensing issues should be based on safety. Far from there being any negative safety issues involved using foreign licences there are positive safety issues in holding an IR never mind where it comes from and it is the regulators own failings which should be highlighted.
Safety doesn't come into it at all. It is 100% politics. But that is a good thing, not a bad thing. If there was a valid safety case, things would look bleak indeed. As it is, it comes down to lobbying by people and bodies with the right connections.
There is no point in speculating what the airframe proposal will contain as it is due out any day now, but it will be interesting and suprising if they actually ban N-reg airframes. The only way to do that is to impose long term parking limits, and that has been proposed twice (France and the UK) and dropped like a red hot potato as soon as it got elevated above the level of the "Cambridge Arts graduate civil servant". It appears just about impossible to draft regs which would work. It is possible with cars but they "benefit" from a highly organised, ever present and almost water tight surveillance network (the police
) - with planes there isn't the infrastructure for this kind of monitoring, and who would set it up and pay for it?
My money would be on a local maintenance oversight, which would satisfy the frequent (if unbased) European-intellectual-emotional objections, centred on the statistically utterly bogus (but often repeated by the axe grinders) assertion that foreign reg planes are not maintained. In this game, the key is to identify the unhappy dogs and work out which piece of meat to throw them, and you don't want to throw them your best pieces; not this early on, anyway. The political players in EASA (I have met some) are very very savvy. (Unlike Eurocontrol who are basically clue-less).
The already-out licensing proposal is going to be the worst, IMHO, but is sure to be a moving target for the next few years.