Richard Riley wrote
I sold a Berkut kit to Mariano Osmeņa, he finished it and has it
flying there, though I don't think he flies it much. He also had a
Lancair 320. The Manila police department had a Lancair ES but
pranged it at the Manila airport. For several years the Lancair
fastbuild kits were manufactured on Cebu, and a number of them were
completed and flew there. Import duty on things like engines and
instruments are nasty.
As for India, a friend of mine sold his Long EZ to a flying club
there.
Well, I walked into this one Richard. (but I'm glad to hear it.) I'm
sure what you say is true. When I was there, however, we found it
impossible for common citizens or honest Ex-Pats to get permission to
operate experimentals anywhere in Luzon where we lived (70 nm west of
Manila.) But maybe that's because we were trying to import them, I
don't know. We were considering going together on a shipping
container until we were told "no experiments allowed in P.I. sir."
But as with most things in the P.I, you can get different answers
depending on who you talk to. If you're a "nobleman" or willing to
pay officials an "extra fee, sir" which is a bribe, then anything's
possible. But operating that way has its own set of pitfalls. If
you came into a disagreement with Erap's government sometime in the
future (like over tax extortion,) sometimes they would deport the poor
guy based on some bribe he made in the past. While not common, it was
possible. This happened to my wife's employer.
I went through the same kind of difficulties with my imported car and
boat. Drove me to drinking! Every couple of months someone would
invent a "new mandatory sticker, sir" for the car or boat that only
cost 500 pesos, but you had to drive all over the place looking for
unmarked gov offices, filling out reams of paperwork, safety
inspections, vin tracings, etc, and often these offices would start
fighting with each other over who was in charge, and they commonly
would call you up and say you had to start all over again. So I just
parked my motorcycle. It wasn't worth all the aggravation! The
imported car had to have a "conduction pass" every five days. It was
maddening.
Guys checked into the Lancair factory, but when their round eyes were
spotted, the prices skyrocketed. So my friend Mark borrows the
missionary Cherokee six as a last resort to get in some GA flying, and
it seemed like everywhere he goes some little gov turd shows up with a
clipboard demanding thousands of pesos in landing fees.
So is experimental aviation legal in the P.I? I guess it is now. Is
it do-able? When I was there in the 90's I never saw any homebuilts.
Lot's of B-18's and DC-3's though.
Cheers,
pacplyer
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