The information I have is that EASA has legal problems re foreign licensed working pilots resident in Europe !
I am not suprised. Several
barristers I know are of the view that there are likely issues there (concerning economic loss, etc) and one of them (who is quite involved in aviation from time to time) reckons that EASA never got legal advice on what they drafted. Well, that seems obvious because even I (a non-lawyer) would have never worded it like that.
I cannot see how on earth it can be this late in the day and there is almost no official line on what we will need to do!
This has been brewing for some years but the bizjet community has had its head stuck totally in the sand. I have posted about it in the bizjet forums and nobody was interested.
Previous attempts to boot out foreign reg aircraft (France 2004 and UK 2005) came to a sticky end, and it is thought that well connected bizjet owners had a big part in that. This did lead to what could have been a false sense of security in later years, but like all the EU regulation-makers EASA is carefully set up to carry on while sticking a finger up to commercial considerations (hence the EU bollox like ROHS, REACH, WEEE, etc) so they have managed to take this further than anybody beforehand.
They still had to get it through the Euro MP vote a few months ago, which looked like they weren't going to get it, so they did a load of furious and secret deals under the table (the EU way, too; the place is thoroughly corrupt andif you met any of the EASA heads you will not be suprised) and this resulted in the delay from April 2012 to April 2014.
Each country can choose to take up (or not) this derogation. So far, the known ones are UK, Netherlands, and (ambiguously) Ireland and Switzerland. The last one is non EU anyway so they can do what they like but they have a record of sucking up to JAA (and almost everything else, so long as the deposits in their banks are not questioned
). But it looks like most of the EU will go for the 2014 derogation.
I would put money on a last minute deal whereby the 14 exams are skipped, and you do just Air Law for your country (which is fairly standard on the ICAO validation/conversion scene) and on the training being shrunk to just a flight test. The latter has a precedent in the proposed CBM IR which has zero mandatory dual time in the IR conversion.
But nobody will pass the CAA IR test (with NDB holds etc) for example with no dedicated training, especially the modern pilots who fly on modern kit i.e. GPS etc. That is why I think getting on with it now is not a lot harder than whatever might come later.
I don't see FAA CPL/IRs being just given an EASA CPL/IR, as a paper exercise. I hope I am wrong of course, but this would fly in the face of everything which Europe and the way Europe does everything stands for. Any EASA IR will have an annual flight test, so logically they will have one up front. And to pass that you will need ... how much training? Fly a few NDB holds and approaches in your jet, using the ADF, holding the inbound track to 5 degrees
