Share in the expenses are zero. Is this legal?

Ron Levy said:
Phew. Hope y'all learned from this -- both what the law is, and that the FAA's prime interest is protecting the public, not getting into family business that doesn't affect anyone outside the family.
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Yep...kid could write daddy a check for half the expenses, which would be covered by the funds daddy puts in his checking account. Problem solved.
 
It's important to remember that despite what our friend Ron claims, these 'letters' have no force of law at all.

The plane language of 61.113 is clearly intended to prevent private pilots from running charters.

I'm 100% sure that there is no documented intent in the actual regulation promulgation process to prohibit family members from sharing an airplane.

Dad can afford a Matrix, he can afford his own lawyer to write a lawyer letter that correctly interprets 61.113 in the almost impossible situation in which someone in the FAA outside the HQ building decided that family members can't share an airplane.

Edited to add:

The case of a family sharing an airplane is nothing like situation that generated the Bobertz letter. In that case a pilot was ferrying groups of passengers in exchange for significant amounts of money in order to support a non-profit event using an airplane provided by a third party owner, and this owner received payment for use of the plane.

For the purposes of this thread Bobertz is orthogonal.
 
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Ron Levy said:
In the Bobertz memo (among other interpretations), they said they'd look at it case-by-case. The fact that you didn't log it does not automatically save you.
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Actually, the Bobertz memo said they do not look at it on a case by case basis.

In any case, it did not mention the option of not logging the time. The CC letters I cited did. What the Bobertz memo discussed was whether logged time was compensation. It made no statement about unlogged time. This business about the time being compensation because you could log it is purely your own invention.
 
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JimNtexas said:
It's important to remember that despite what our friend Ron claims, these 'letters' have no force of law at all.
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That is a rather misleading statement. By considerable legal precedent, a Federal agency's interpretations of its own regulations, are accepted by the courts unless it can be proven to the court that they are wrong. Yes, the line in Title 49 requiring the NTSB to accept FAA legal interpretations unless they were "arbitrary, capricious, or otherwise not according to law" was removed by the PBOR legislation, but the bulk of the legal precedent is not based on the removed section, and the force of such interpretations by any Federal agency (including the FAA) remains nearly overwhelming. If you think you can beat an FAA enforcement action by substituting your own interpretation of the rules for the FAA's, you are in for a long, expensive, and almost certainly futile battle.
 
Does anyone know of an enforcement case where the FAA poked their nose into the financial arrangements between family menbers ?
 
Henning said:
Nope, and there is no one suggesting that they would.
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That is the answer right there.

If I was flying around my dad without footing the bill, I would probably not go around and brag about it. Short of a criminal investigation, the FAA would not go back and subpoena bank records to determine who made what payment on my 'plane' credit card account.
 
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