Terry,
my understanding (and it may start an argument, and am happy to be
corrected, in the subtleties or because I may be outright wrong)
Flying over.
That's a no brainer, irrespective of the type of ownership (crown lease,
freehold etc) the property owner doesn't own the air above their
property, except I think as high up as they build (and don't own
everything under their feet either, I think). So all sorts of aircraft
(gliders included) can fly there. Provided they comply with the air
navigation laws which are in part notionally to protect the people below.
Landing out.
Well, I think we actually have no right to do this. On the face of it
(IANAL) it is straight out trespass.
However, it is a grey/complex area as I believe there can be extenuating
circumstances to trespass. An example might be a person trying to escape
from a threat, seeking safety. Maybe a plane forced to land due to
engine failure is like that. Are gliders forced to land? Did we have to
pick that particular paddock? How long do we intend to stay? That's
where it all gets rather sticky. Until there is an actual court case
bought against an outlanding glider, we won't know for sure, and maybe
not even then.
All I know is that I haven't flown a glider cross country for a long
time. Two of the last outlandings I went to (one as pilot and one as
part of the crew) started off with quite bad feeling on the part of the
landowners. One because the owner claimed the glider had contaminated a
genetically specialised crop and one because just prior to me outlanding
in his field the farmer had been forced to accept an easement for an
underground telco cable through his property and was generally unhappy
with anyone now being there.
Both situations were not fun and enough to make me wary of these
situations for the future.
Regards
SWK
On 24/03/2012 8:52 AM, Terry Neumann wrote:
Dear fellow gliding peoples,
On 21/03/2012 4:24 PM, Christopher Mc Donnell wrote:
Having had an academic interest in easements and rights of way for
many years I found the link below very interesting.
OK - it morphed into an interesting discussion of alternative power
options, (which I was enjoying actually).
However may I raise an issue of glider pilot's rights in a parallel
area. Some years ago I was confronted by a friend - a fellow farmer
- who lives on the other side of the local village. He was somewhat
irate and wanted to know what right a glider pilot had to land on
someone's property without their permission (his in this instance -
because it _had_ happened), or to even to fly over their property
without permission. There _were_ reasons for the second question
which I won't detail here.
I was struggling for a solid convincing answer at the time. I
actually wrote an article for AG (yes it's that long ago) about this
whole outlanding business from a farmer's point of view, but after my
previous journalistic efforts which had quite adverse results in one
particular instance, I backed off. It was never submitted. Nor did
I offer an answer in the article because there didn't appear to be one.
I suggest that the concept of a persons "rights" has strengthened
throughout society since that time. So I'll ask it now. Exactly
what is our 'right' to fly over someone else's property without their
permission, or perhaps more importantly, to land on their property -
again without permission - when the wind stops blowing?
regards,
TN
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