US industry trade bodies are calling on the US Federal Aviation Administration to abandon plans to limit “priority service” aircraft registration for international flights to one request per N-registered aircraft in a three-month period. The FAA has already bowed to industry pressure by delaying introduction of the new limited service by six months to 1 January.
The priority service was introduced by the FAA to offer an intermediate solution for owners and operators where there has been a change in the registration of their aircraft. Currently, owners are issued with a temporary registration document called a pink slip, which restricts travel to domestic operations usually for up to 39 days until the full registration document, dubbed the white registration card, is issued. The priority service now permits an unlimited number of registrations for international flights while this documentation is being processed.
The FAA argues it has been inundated with requests for the priority service, and its resources are being squeezed. Furthermore, it says, the system is being abused by a growing number of applicants who request the service and fail to undertake their international flights. “Preliminary data would suggest that the vast majority of the international flights submitted to the registry never took place,” says the FAA.
Mike Nichols, director of tax, economics and operations services with the National Business Aviation Association (NBAA), is concerned that slashing priority service to only one request per aircraft in three months will adversely affect many international operations notably fractional ownership programmes. These create the largest volume of requests due to the relatively frequent and regular changes in ownership, “particularly those aircraft with 16 owners”, Nichols says.
“We are trying to eliminate abuse of the system so if you don’t have an absolute need to use the prioity service, don’t use it,” he says.
NBAA, the National Aircraft Resale Association and the National Air Transportation Association “have seven months to find a solution and if we can keep the number of applications to the priority service down to FAA benchmark numbers the agency may be able to allocate the resource to speeding up the full registration process”. The trade bodies are also pressing for the pink slip to be used for international flights, he says.
Source: Flight International
