as you must be an EU citizen to own an EU aircraft.
That's false, in the general case. For example anybody can own a G-reg.
but I couldn't own a D-reg
How do you know?
I had only one year to change my car drivers licence to a German one.
That's right but cars are different. You need to be locally registered because
- road tax is a huge tax raising tool (aircraft over 2T IFR pay route charges which are collected according to the airspace you overfly, by Eurocontrol)
- foreign reg cars avoid paying parking tickets, camera generated penalties, and (if you don't stop after an accident and leave the country before they find you) prosecution for any offence short of one that is extraditable (which basically means something like killing somebody) - whereas in aviation ICAO provides for international enforcement; in 2003 I busted a French TRA and the CAA went after me on behalf of the DGAC
- the linkage between road tax databases and insurance databases and number plate databases is not international, so those checks would all fail, etc etc whereas in aviation the airport where you didn't pay the bills soon goes after you
The only reason is to restrict the "free trade" of professionals.
That, plus it is the result of established institutions looking after themselves. If you set up an FTO to teach the IR, it is hardly going to turn round and say "we are not going to teach this theory; it is 90% bollox". They will get stuck in and prepare the study material, etc.
These people are only human. Same with ISO9000 and all the other scams which pervade business in the EU. All the people working in those fields have families to feed, etc. The other day I got a quote for a couple of little items. I replied with an email saying "please ship them, order number is XYZ". They would not accept that because their ISO9000 quality manager requires each customer to explicitly specify what he wants to buy
Large chunks of our society are now stuck in this s**t and aviation is no different; in fact aviation is brilliant because the "s-word" takes care of just about any objection.
The "fault" lies at the top, for allowing these monsters to come into existence. No good blaming EASA. Blame those who set it up, and then didn't oversee it closely and allowed it to grow out of control.
As regards safety, read the AF447 reports. If that plane was on the registry of the Peoples' Republic of Upper Volta, it would make sense. But because it is (was) F-reg, nobody could believe it and you got hundreds of pages on p p r u n e analysing why it happened.