If you had a website which said:
"I am going to France on Tuesday at 10am, anyone want to come and we'll share the costs"
Then I think that would be ok, and the flight is intended anyway.
Not if the UK ANO applies - this is precisely within the wording of what would count as public transport. Of course, this might be entirely legal in the US and other places. I'm not sure that it
should be illegal in the UK, but it is until the ANO is changed.
I am totally against illegal charter, but while we are discussing hypotheticals
...
Quote:
The purpose of the law is to prevent you running something that is like a passenger service, with the schedule set out in advance. Read the ANO with this in mind.
Indeed but nobody can do that unless they
massively breach the cost sharing rules, because no pilot is going to do the flight unless they can make a
profit.
Isn't a realistic scenario that of an hour builder, running a daily 10am flight to X, with the passengers picking up a large portion of the cost? I can see why the CAA wants to prevent that kind of thing.
The aim (to the extent that you can ever discover the aim of UK legislation from its wording [and yes, this does make me cross!]) seems to be that public transport pilots should be trained to ahigher standard. The general public is allowed to cost share if the flight is purely for fun. Then the restrictions, as drafted, try to capture fun flying by ruling out everything which might be perceived as a transport service. Thus anything which says "Departure 10.00" isn't allowed, unless those told arealready pilots or trainee pilots, in which case they understand that this means "10, if the aircraft works, and once I've had my tea, subject to weather and changing my mind".
I think the present drafting was the best the CAA could hack together, many years ago and long before the internet, to make it reasonably hard to set up cost sharing arrangements.
For certain. And of course, we can't expect our lawmakers to spend time updating out-of-date laws, or explaining what laws mean to those who are expected to comply with them. Far more important things to do.
It strikes me as verging on the scandalous that almost no-one here (maybe even no-one) is capable of understanding the ANO, and
it's not their fault.