When it comes to N reg I believe if you base an N reg aircraft in Europe you should pay the equivalent fees to EASA that would be payable by a G reg aircraft and their crew
I would agree with that in principle. Unfortunately EASA is an artificial creation, purporting to be safety-driven but actually it exists mostly to run all kinds of contrived scams designed to create work for assorted 200k euro p.a. gravy train riders inside it (like "Mr Pantomine" Goudou) and more assorted Part 21 organisations outside it
They create this work by gold plating ICAO procedures, and by disregarding approvals done by the FAA which directly or indirectly runs about 90% of the world's GA.
It is wrong to accept that such a monster should be funded at all.
But while on the topic of funding EASA, I pay as much for my Annual on the N as I used to pay, or would pay, for a G. So the MO gets as much from me towards its EASA/CAA fees as it gets from a G... in fact more because they don't have to do any paperwork for me (I pay the FAA IA separately, on top, for his signoff). It's a bit of a scam but I don't complain...
The other thing is that a full implementation of "user pays" inevitably leads to a system under which all kinds of contrived fundraising goes on. Yesterday I read that that other ludicrous job creation outfit (Ofcom
) is proposing the charge phone companies 10p for every unused phone number. The purpose of this is - are you ready for this? - to raise tax revenues by creating a market in desirable numbers. If I did not have a life here in the UK I would pack up and emigrate to somewhere which is not run by d1ckheads (and which will almost certainly be warmer too
). In the meantime N Europe will just implode up the back orifices of the id1ots who set its policies.
The "user pays" principle is what led to ATC privatisation, which has in turn led to the crippling of GA utility, by creating the intractable situation of mandatory ATC for any GPS approach procedure, which means GPS approaches (which were the only hope of improving the utility of GA) will never become operationally relevant in the UK - because nearly all the airports which would really benefit from them will never be able to afford the bills from NATS or from whoever employes the ATCO doing the approach control.
The "user pays" principle is OK for very narrow endeavours which have no possible wider economic benefits.