Rigga, I think you are right, but wasn't that just because they were too lazy to change and then republish all the references in other Regulations (eG EASA OPS) to 2042/2003?
The fact is that to a normal English-speaking person, when a piece of legislation has been repealed, it is no more; it is dead legislation and cannot be "revived".
But we are not dealing with normality when we deal with EASA; we are dealing with second-grade European bureaucrats selected to satisfy quota needs from member States. French bureaucracy, in particular, is designed to be impenetrable except to the chosen few, and EASA has always been heavily influenced by French customs.
As an exasperated delegate from the Czech Republic once said (at an EASA workshop on the NPA that was going to introduce Safety Management to Continuing Airworthiness, itself now lost without trace in the Tower of Babel) "As an independent National Aviation Authority it would take us a month or less, if necessary, to implement an ICAO recommendation. It takes EASA at least 3 years to do the same thing".
He was absolutely right, of course, the EASA "Rulemaking Process" is a tortuous, convoluted passage through a minefield of time-consuming European/French bureaucracy.
When the process concerns implementing an ICAO Recommendation, EASA works hard on adding unnecessary rules to the Recommendation, already agreed by all ICAO States, simply to justify EASA's existence.
For the ultimate example of why EASA should not exist, you have to look at the process and documentation involved with EASA's take-over of Aerodrome regulation. Starting with the absolute lack of any business, political or operational case for taking this over, EASA went on to amend the global, and very high standards provided in Annexe 14 into a huge bundle of rules, many in excess of the ICAO requirement. The NPA documentation for this ran to well over 1,000 pages.
(I had the misfortune to represent an Operators's organisation at a 2-day Workshop about the NPA, during which the appalling standard of drafting and lack of operational and technical knowledge among EASA staffers was highlighted time and again. For example, one question from the floor about Declared Distances was met with incomprehension, and it quickly became toe-curlingly, embarrassingly clear that none of the 5 staffers on the panel, who were responsible for drafting the section being discussed, understood what "Declared Distances" actually are, in the context of airside facilities. One man, ex-UK CAA, opined that "Declared Distance" simply meant the length of the actual tarmac from end to end, and nothing else.)
The Aerodrome Regulation then, in effect, exempted any aerodrome that did not comply with these new regulations, because of the multitude of practical and economic reasons why they could not.
All in all, a total waste of time and huge sums of taxpayers money, leading to no effective change whatsoever in the provision of airports and their facilities in any EASA Member State.
Last edited by Capot; 26th May 2015 at 10:22.