Keef wrote:
Might be apocryphal - might be true.
Dunno about the Gite story, but I'm sure the magazines covered one "a little while back" (my sense of time has gone!) about a guy who always landed at Le Touquet, then flew to xxx (somewhere nearby without customs) then flew home, having filed a flight plan at Le T to fly back departing xxx to the UK direct.
As I recall he was surprised one day when the boys in blue landed at xxx as he was about to taxi and he got handed a big penalty fine. His main gripes were:
1- He'd always done it, and the Customs man at Le T. knew he always did it.
2- He wasn't hiding he was doing it (the flight plan said so)
3- As they got him before he left, he hadn't actually done it the time they got him for it!
Those three points are quite typical of what any UK pilot would say, and sadly amusing to anyone who has experienced French officialdom in action in the following ways:
1 The first relating to the idea that a French low level official would do anything pro-active given the alternative of doing nothing about it until it was flavour of the month.
2 The second being that once the 'swat team' had been told to make an example of someone, they would go to the bother of finding someone at random when there was a pilot shouting 'come and get me when you are ready' by filing a flight plan saying what he was doing,
3 and thirdly, the Anglo-saxon idea that you actually have to commit a crime to be guilty of it. All the third one would do is make them smile, pause for a minute to wax their clubs and clean out their tear-gas spray nozzles and then carry on demanding a fine be paid.
Anyway, whatever the final outcome, (ie: if his arguments won or not), I bet he doesn't do it any more!