There is a thread running
here.
Yes this has been brewing for a few years, but what has caught people out is that EASA came up with a 2 year derogation (till April 2014) which offered breathing space for various conversion options to come along
BUT, on the day (8/4/2012), it transpired that only a few EU countries had applied for the derogation.
Since the derogation is tied to the (vaguely speaking; the EASA reg is pretty vague which is how they like it)
EU residence of the
operator of the aircraft (the residence or citizenship of the
pilot is irrelevant, unless he is the operator, which in the simple owner-pilot case is probably true) this means that most N-regs in the EU are now technically illegal to fly (or overfly) to most places in the EU, including within their own countries
It's a huge mess.
Obviously there is no enforcement and nobody knows if/when there ever will be any.
The big question is why almost nobody has applied for the derogation.
Nearly all EU countries have for
decades happily accomodated N-regs (and the FAA-based others like Caymans) on their soil, so it appears unlikely that they deliberately did not apply for the derogation in order to ground them. Much as the usual suspects (FTO owners, instructors, etc) like to believe this, it doesn't stack up for me, not least because most countries are full of foreign reg bizjets flying around their most influential people and politicians.
So I think it is a cockup, born out of
- EASA's hobby of generating 1000 page documents which obviously nobody (with a life) is going to read, and one needs an excellent (obscessive) understanding of aviation regulation to understand even parts of them. Even within each national CAA there will be only a few people who can understand this stuff.
- a broad hate of the EU and especially its current top level politics (Greek crisis, born partly out of heavy bribery of Greek politicians by German companies with Germany/France then wanting the money back, etc)
- an unwillingness to get involved in a complicated regulation (the "EU operator residence" has so many obvious work-arounds, for anybody above the level of a simple owner-pilot) for which there is absolutely no framework in traditional aviation, where a CAA ramp check looks for aircraft papers and pilot papers, simply...
I laugh at Cathar's mention of a "democratic process". See the euro parliament video links
here. It's a sham, with sycophantic behaviour reminiscent of Nazi Germany and Hitler visiting Italy. The "voting" is then followed by under the table dealing by EASA heads to get MEP support, by making promises like a BASA with the USA which the mostly clue-less MEPs won't realise is empty.
My own concern is that while PROB99.9 there won't be any criminal enforcement for years, if ever, your
insurance could be void. This is why I did the JAA IR
conversion recently. The JAA/EASA papers are not even valid to fly my own plane (do not meet FAR 61.3 once I am outside the UK) so they are a purely an insurance policy which cost me a fair bit of time and about £10k to buy and which will cost me about £200/year to renew (IR renewal annually and a PPL renewal 2-yearly). I would recommend anybody on a foreign reg to ask their insurer what he thinks of this situation. My experience is that the standard dumb answer is "you need to be legal" but at the same time they will be very concerned at a large % of their high net worth (bizjet) client base being potentially uninsured
with the insurer aware of it.