FAA grounds aircraft registered through UK consultancy due to violation

The FAA announced on Tuesday that it has officially notified Southern Aircraft Consultancy Inc. (SACI) that all of its aircraft registration certificates are invalid. The administration states the company violated US citizenship requirements when it submitted the registration applications and instructed it to surrender all of its certificates. SACI registered aircraft for both U.S. citizens and foreign nationals using trust agreements. To register in this manner, the trustee or company must either be a U.S. citizen or a resident alien. The FAA claims that the consultancy violated those regulations and must return registration certificates to the FAA within 21 days. The invalid registrations resulted in the immediate grounding of all American (N) registered aircraft through SACI. The owners who wish to re-register their aircraft in the U.S. will need to submit an Aircraft Registration Application to the FAA, provide evidence of ownership and pay a registration fee of $5. The owner will then have temporary approval to operate only within the U.S. until either the FAA denies the application or delivers a Certificate of Aircraft Registration. RELATED STORIES: FAA releases draft plan to transition to unleaded avgas by 2030 DOT and FAA announce contracts to replace U.S. radar system FAA lifts airspace restriction on Venezuelan airspace for commercial aircraft SACI sent out a statement through AOPA UK stating that it was shocked by the news. The company further claimed that grounding all of its aircraft was unreasonable and gave no time for anyone to reregister their aircraft reasonably. "The absolute most important thing to us is to find a way forward that minimizes disruption and inconvenience to our clients," said SACI in its statement. "To this end, we are pursuing the transfer of the entire business to a US-based Trust Company. Doing this would mean that no clients would need to re-register their aircraft - the new Trust Company would simply become the new Trustee for all of our Trusts. We are also hoping to agree with the new Trust Company that they will honour all existing annual Trust fees already paid by our clients."