Story ID: 
New FAA Policy Could Delay Aircraft Transactions
By: Mark Huber
Caption: U.S. aircraft owners could be forced onto foreign registrations by a new FAA privacy policy.
Word Count: 359
A new FAA measure to safeguard the privacy of aircraft owners could further mire the aircraft registration process in more delay. At the height of the aircraft transaction season, the FAA has blocked public access to ancillary records for aircraft ownership that are often required to complete transactions. These include documents pertaining to trusts, estates, mergers, consolidations, distributions, powers of attorney, and limited liability company statements belonging to those registered in the Civil Aircraft Registry Electronic System.  
However, the FAA will allow public access to a summary page of those records. Aircraft brokers and attorneys maintain that this is a half-measure that will further delay the U.S. registration of aircraft, which was already taking as long as six months, and likely force them to make time-consuming, individual requests for the records from the FAA general counsel’s office. In the interim, new owners may be forced to place aircraft on foreign registries such as Bermuda or Isle of Man in order to complete transactions, warns AIN contributor and aviation attorney David Mayer, a partner in the Dallas-based firm of Shackleford, Bowen, McKinley & Norton. 
“There will be delays in transactions if they [the FAA] stick by the policy, and it comes at an extremely demanding time transactionally because we're trying to get things done at year-end,” Mayer told AIN. “It’s extremely difficult to tell a client, ‘We know you want your airplane next week and we can accomplish that transactionally, but we need information from the FAA we can’t get.’”
Mayer said an interim solution could be to foreign register aircraft temporarily. “You don’t need to request information [from the FAA] if you are registered elsewhere and that is what I probably will recommend [to clients] if there’s not a seamless path to get the information within the transaction timing, just do a foreign registry and then figure out how to deregister and register [the aircraft] back in the U.S. at a later time.”