This one has come up here many times.
Take the simplest case, where you rent a plane for a day's business trip. The rental costs you £1000. You can stick all of that £1000 in your business expenses i.e. recover the lot. No need for a CPL.
If you own the plane personally, then it is a little more complicated but there is an accepted principle there too: let's say during the calendar year your total flying expenses (fuel, landing fees, Annual, etc) came to £20000. Let's say during that year you spent 20% of your airborne time (or Hobbs time, if that's what you use) on trips exclusively for the business. You can now stick £4000 in your expenses. This is legit with both HMRC and the CAA.
If 100% of the flying was on business then you can reclaim the lot. Of course this is highly unlikely (though not impossible).
Owning the plane by the business (if a Ltd Co) is best avoided because it facilitates an attack by HMRC under the BIK (benefit in kind) rules and they positively love that. I would avoid it even if 100% of your flying was on business.
The above is for both a G-reg and N-reg.
If you do a business trip and carry other company employees, that's OK too, on a PPL. Just make sure nobody is obliged to
FLY (i.e. can take a train, etc). The grey area is when you carry customers, etc......
If you carry passengers (in the general case) and
cost share, that is a different topic.
On a G-reg it is well defined, although there is a long standing ambiguity on whether you can share the cost of airborne-time-related costs such as 50hr checks, 150hr checks, the engine fund, etc. IMHO, these can all be shared but the Annual itself cannot.
On an N-reg, the FAA has some bizzare rules concerning a "common purpose" which are so strict they are mostly unworkable.
A lot has been written on this stuff. Try a search of the forum - in fact google may be more productive and is a much more intelligent way of searching p
pr une than the search function here
