Restoring the Freedom to Fly for Private Benefit

[DrMack]

A proposal is presented to Congress to obtain statutory relief from the FAA's bizarre collection of legal opinions that have strangled the general aviation community by prohibiting fair reimbursement of expenses incurred for a flight that is conducted by a private pilot incidentally in connection with a business.

Traction for the proposal is growing rapidly and it is maturing quite nicely in the public dialogue. I am not a registered lobbyist so I have limited my presentation of the proposal to organizations that are (AOPA, NBAA, EAA, GAMA, etc.), public venues like this one, and to my own US House member. So until one of the registered lobbyist organizations decides to walk the bill in the halls on the Hill, the project necessarily remains a grassroots "letter writing" campaign that therefore must rely on you, my fellow private pilots, to personally contact your own representatives to express your support.

In my next post I will lay out the state of the proposal as it is today. So ladies and gentlemen, start your flame throwers ...

 

[Jim Logajan]

(b) A private pilot may, for compensation or hire, act as pilot in command of an aircraft in connection with any business or employment if:
(1) The flight is only incidental to that business or employment; and
(2) The aircraft does not carry passengers or property for compensation or hire.I think if one strikes out the text indicated from the regulations, the sentence below highlighted in red in Mangiamele would be a reasonable conclusion:

In regard to whether you may seek reimbursement from your employer for transporting your colleagues, since you are transporting people to the meeting, the allowance for the flight to be conducted for compensation or hire (i.e., reimbursement) under 61.113(b) does not apply. The exception in paragraph (b) allows you to use your private pilot certificate only for compensation or hire if the operation is incidental to your employment and you are not transporting other passengers or property. Thus, because you are transporting people to the meeting, you may not seek reimbursement from your employer for this flight under 14 C.F.R. § 61.113(b).The struck qualifier, "for compensation or hire," when added back in, can be seen to reduce the scope of the prohibition - it does not expand it. Specifically, it seems to allow for cases where a pilot is compensated for a flight so long as the passengers or property are riding free. The problem with the letter seems to be that the assumption in green is not the only permutation, and the letter contains a non sequitur in generating the statement in red.

Lastly, the Alaska Hunters case makes reference to two cases, Marshall (1963) and Humble (1992) that were adjudicated in favor of private pilots who had passengers and property on board and were compensated for the flights. In both cases the judges found the transport to be incidental to their businesses.

I would normally expect case law to take precedence over an opinion letter when parsing the scope and meaning of regulations. As it happens I have been fully compensated as a private pilot when I flew to a client a couple months ago and had on board some intellectual property that I also delivered. I think I was within the law.