What is `promoting a flight` and the ANO?

[mm_flynn]

While I would agree with ProfChrisRead about the generally poor level of drafting in the ANO, I think the principles the ANO is trying to achieve are reasonably clear (with some interpolating between the lines)

1. Providing flying services to 'the public' should be regulated and undertaken by 'professionally' licenced organisations and individuals
2. It is acceptable for a service that is very specialist and does not carry other people or their property to have a lower level of structural organisation
3. Private people also fly and they may well have friends/club mates. (My Assumption Here) And these individuals will be much more familiar with the nature of the person flying and the type of operation and as responsible citizens should be allowed to choose to participate or not without undue interference from the State.

This then results in the structure we have which is

1. Public Transport (of people or goods) requires a professional organisation to manage/control/be accountable, etc. Hence all these activities must be undertaken under an AOC. The AOC terms will specifiy in detail the training and licencing requirements of the pilots and other key participants
2. Other forms of service (Aerial Work) which do not involve risk to the general public either as passengers or their goods, should be undetaken to a level of professionalism that does not take unreasonable risks in the pursuit of profit (Hence the higher airworthiness requriements under old CAA rules for public vs private aircraft and the need for a CPL for 'commercial' non-public transport work
3. FInally, we have private flights which are lightly requlated. But how do we distinguish these from the two regulated ones. One obvious way is 'is anyone being paid?'

It is this last point that then introduces all of the complexity because lots of people are paid in respect of any flight. A typical rental flight will have the club paid for the aircraft, the airport paid for landing/takeoff fees, the fueler for fuel, Eurocontrol (if you are more than 2 tonnes), etc.. So just because money changed hands doesn't prove anything about the commerciality.

So, I think (once again an assumption of mine), the CAA tried to get around this by recognising that these payments are all reasonable, but that the pilot can not make anything like a profit and must stand a reasonable part of the cost. Hence excluding fixed costs and allowing only costs directly related to the flight. Furthermore, to avoid taking the p!ss (i.e. 'cost sharing' a fully loaded biz jet), the CAA have the 'we are talking about small groups of known friends' concept. Which leads us to it is only 4 people at a time and it is not generally advertised (which then would have banned club fly outs so I suspect this clause is a 'fix' rather than a strategy).

In this context, I think the original poster 'advertising' future flights would fall foul of the CAA intent, unless it was accessible only to a very close group of friends that effectively were a flying club. Describing past flights, in the context of a website that said, 'call me an we can arrange for you to make this flight as well', would seem to not meet the spirit. Telling someone, do you want to go flying with me next weekend, look at my website and pick a destination or two and depending on weather we will go seems perfectly reasonable.

The FAA has a 'common purpose rule' for cost sharing private flights. If you are all flying to the city to go to the same convention that's OK to cost share. If three of you are going to the convention and a fourth person tags along for a lift to the city (and pays a share) then that is not OK. (Note UK DfT rules apply to N-reg ops in the UK, hence Peter's comment about cost sharing not being allowed).