Donating a flight for an auction.

[Challenged]

The local Coastal Conservation Association has inquired about the possibility of me donating my airplane and piloting skills for a local auction. As I do not currently have my commercial rating, I'm wondering about the FAA's take on the process of money exchanging hands for a flight, even though technically I won't receive any compensation. Any extra liability issues in this beyond normal insurance coverage?

 

[Jim Logajan]

No. The issue isn't so much the pilot's certificate level as it is the lack of legal authority to accept compensation for providing air transportation of passengers. What isn't always clearly covered in pilot training is that a commercial pilot certificate issued per Part 61 only allows you to fly the plane when money is changing hands -- not to collect money from passengers for the flight, which requires that the party receiving that money hold a commercial operating certificate issued according to Part 119 to operate under one of the commercial operating parts (like 121 or 135). Of course, when passengers are paying for the flight, a CP or better is required to pilot the aircraft, but that's a separate issue from the certificate required to be providing air transportation for compensation/hire.

I suspect the problem in understanding commercial pilot privileges and limits may not be with pilot training as much as it is with the FAA's lazy reference to "the applicable parts of this chapter" in the text of 61.133. So, lacking an understanding of the import or meaning of that phrase, it seems to suggest a commercial pilot likely can directly accept compensation with only a CP in hand.

Only FAA regulation cognoscenti are likely to know that Title 14 is split into 5 chapters and 5 volumes (these appear to be two overlapping categorizations of the same material) and that Parts 1 to 199 are in Chapter I, Parts 200 to 399 are in Chapter II, Parts 200 to 1199 are in Chapter III (yes, Parts 200 to 399 appear in two different Chapters!) , and Parts 1200 to 1299 appear in Chapter V. (No, I have no idea where Chapter IV went.)

All those Parts are also subdivided into Volumes, but I wont go into that. Not to belabor the point, us poor civilians who aren't allowed to claim ignorance of the law need some cheat sheet to figure this stuff out - and the FAA doesn't go out of its way to present that material in a sensible manner. Fortunately they had to let some people in on the obscurities, so a nice summary is to be found in Figure 12-2 of Chapter 12 of the Aviation Maintenance Technician Handbook:

https://www.faa.gov/regulations_pol...craft/amt_handbook/media/FAA-8083-30_Ch12.pdf

Otherwise everyone is left to their own devices in determining 61.133's parent chapter and its contents and still needs to scan all of it to determine which parts are "applicable", since the FAA couldn't be bothered to be more specific (they can be when they want.)