It is more likely that this area of the Basic Regulation will be addressed in Part OPS, the NPA for which has not yet been published.
Hasn't it? I thought something had, a few months ago.
I too recall reading somewhere, a few months ago, that EASA said that it would be the
OPS stuff which would enable it to control 3rd country aircraft.
Re Emirates etc, you are right and I made a bad point.
Not necessarily. There are now UK based AOC operators flying non EU reg aircraft. I did some research on this a long time ago and the DfT grants permissions for this provided no local based operators lodge an objection, IIRC. Emirates could well have an EU based operating company. All this stuff will have to be covered somehow.
The whole issue of "residence" is going to be very complex and - for many - quite impossible to resolve. For starters, anybody with a non-EU
tax residence which is accepted by their local HMRC inspector is going to have a pretty good defence. Throw in some goodies like the plane being owned and leased out by a Jersey operating company and it gets better still. And ever since EASA came out with the 'operator' stuff it has been stated that N-regs, owned often by US based companies, will be yet another case.
To me, this stuff looks like it was produced by a committee which set out to boot out foreign reg ops (no shortage of people in Europe to fill the chairs on that one; go to any aviation related conference and pick out the aviation officials who have never flown a plane; any of them would do just fine) but the committee's deliberations were moderated by some slightly more realistic people higher up, but nobody has (yet) stepped back and looked at the overall picture.