EASA is hoping to achieve mutual license acceptance by signing reciprocal treaties instead."
But where specifically does it say this? In which document/section?
It doesn't say it anywhere I know, but is widely known. I was also told this by the most senior possible EASA official, face to face.
IO540 - it seems you are in this process somewhere - are you able to answer my questions (1) and (2) I originally posed?
I am not involved officially - I am merely an interested observer who keeps his ear to the ground.
There is NO more official information on the future of any IFR privilege in Europe at the moment - end of story. Obviously it is obvious that the JAA IR will be grandfathered into whatever EASA comes up with, but lots of private pilots are looking for something nearer the FAA version, and lots of people are looking for something to grandfather the UK IMCR into.
My
guess is that an "EASA IR" of some sort will eventually emerge, which will contain some intermediate stage at which some IFR privileges will be available, and the UK IMCR will be grandfathered into this, at the level of the appropriate module.
The CAA can indeed apply for an extension to EASA on the IMCR, and they said openly that they would do that, at the Feb 08 IMCR conference which I attended (email me if you like a copy of the notes I made), but this tactic is not a permanent solution; it merely buys some time.
European aviation politics is a pretty dirty business at times, with vote trading going on outside the rooms and under the table. You merely need to visit Brussels to see what a blatent expenses driven gravy train the whole place is. There are a lot of good people there but the useless and incompetent are everywhere. Also EASA is merely an agency of the EC transport commission which means that they must do as they are told by the latter - despite appearances. This in turn means that top-end political issues can and do come into it; for example the not-yet-published OPS proposal has been delayed by some unspecified political problem. The whole thing is pretty opaque and will remain hard to guess for at least a year or two, IMHO.
I reckon the IMCR will survive - either as I describe above or in some last minute hack which will be Europe-wide (because it has to be...) but which everybody but the UK will be able to opt out of to whatever extent they feel like doing.
The general drift in any EASA IR will be for it to be more competence based than the blunt 50/55 hrs of the JAA IR, so IMCR holders could reasonably expect to have their instrument training allowed - just like the FAA allows towards the FAA IR.
But as I say nobody knows what will happen, and nobody can possibly know for 1-2 years at least. Sure, we will have people speculating on, and occassionally leaking, EASA committee minutes, but these do not necessarily mean much because the EASA exec can chuck a proposal right out if there is a serious political problem with it.