Lockhaven wrote:What is the definition of living in the UK ?
Do any of the people possibly affected have dual passports.
Do you still have relatives in the USA.
Have you got a second home in either the USA or Europe.
Residence in the UK is also a grey an area (if we're talking tax residence anyway, I don't know of any other definition in the law) and is something I've dealt with in the past. The UK has a "ties" system of residence whereby if you have purely no ties and no work in the UK it's the 183 day rule, but as soon as you have family, property, assets, previous tax ties or even what HMRC could deem "a place of stay" then you denote your time required to trigger residency status by a points based system (the highest number of points means that you could trigger UK residency by spending as little as 16-45 days in the UK in a given tax year)! The CAA have not seemed to clarify what they deem as residents but I suppose that would be a fun legal argument if it came down to proving it.
In terms of people affected such as myself, I do have a second passport to my UK one (Czech), however if I were to try to claim my residency status as being outside the UK then I would fall foul of this CAA Rule:
Guidance for visiting pilots, including FAA certificate holders not residing in the UK
You need to follow the declaration process below before flying in UK airspace, regardless of the aircraft registration.
This can allow you to fly for up to 28 days per calendar year, from 1 January until 31 December., as stated in the Aircrew Regulation. Pilots should try and declare as early as possible in the calendar year should they want to use the full 28 days permitted.
Which means I'd only get to fly in UK airspace for 28 days in a given calendar year, so pointless for me.
Also in terms of why I've kept my FAA licence for flying in the UK (I do not fly N-reg in the UK, just G-reg) - it's the same reason as @2Donkeys mentioned: the CAA/JAA/EASA system seems a horrendous mess of constant rule updates, needless costs and hoops to jump through, so I've been trying as hard as possible to not get caught up in that pond and trying to keep the utopia of having just one ICAO licence to fly globally (I fly in the US often too, so didn't want the pain of having two licences to keep current separately).