May 14, 2026
Internationally, business aviation is entering a more demanding regulatory environment, with every aspect of flight operations requiring greater precision and better documentation.
That was the key takeaway from a panel of experts on a recent NBAA News Hour webinar, “International Regulatory Outlook: Key Changes and What Operators Need to Know.”
“Mission readiness needs to be a primary focus for business aviation operators,” stated Clément Meersseman, vice president of strategic partnerships at Nimbl and NBAA International Operators Committee Regional Lead for North America.
He noted that small technical changes can create outsized risks if operators do not keep procedures up to date. These include revised flight-planning surveillance codes, updated ADS-B Out filing codes and Europe’s new supplemental lost-communications transponder code 7601.
He also pointed to an expected FAA letter of authorization for Part 91 operators, C078, which will detail specific procedures and approvals for lower-than-standard IFR takeoff minima that may align with international operational requirements.
Meersseman also warned that the transition to LED lighting at airports worldwide imposes new responsibilities on operators.
“One of the challenges that has been discovered is that enhanced flight vision system sensors do not work well with LEDs because they are based on infrared,” he explained. “You may expect to use an EFVS approach and still not see anything on your monitor. We can’t do anything about airports replacing those bulbs, so what operators must do is be prepared for it.”
Operators traveling to Europe should also be wary of border procedures and taxation, as the compliance burden increasingly falls on operators, said Adam Hartley, CEO and founder of Hartley Business Aviation Consulting. This means earlier reporting of passenger data and a greater emphasis on the digital border security systems used to enter the EU and Schengen Area, he noted.
Crucially, Hartley added, business aircraft operators should be wary of the region’s layered tax system.
“An operator may be paying navigation fees, airport fees, carbon taxes or security taxes, but those are often local or regional charges and may not meet the additional national requirement,” he noted. “Those national requirements often require fiscal or legal representation, which a ground handler is not going to be able to do proactively on your behalf. My biggest advice is to confirm and not assume that everything is covered.”
On the safety front, Nathan Shelley, assistant manager of flight planning operations at Universal Weather and Aviation, and NBAA International Operators Committee Regional Lead, Europe, highlighted a concerning 29% rise in gross navigation errors on transatlantic flights, most of which were lateral errors.
Shelley said that cockpit discipline was at the root of this increase, with crews flying filed routes instead of cleared routes, or accepting CPDLC changes before they are fully loaded and cross-checked.
“Verify your clearance. Never confuse your filed routing with the cleared routing and treat every CPDLC message like a full clearance review,” Shelley warned. “Gross navigation errors are preventable, but only with disciplined execution: communicate, coordinate and remove assumptions. This is what keeps us safely aligned in a very unforgiving environment.”
Also preventable are recurring issues at European ramp inspections, noted Andrew Karas, director of the IS-BAO Programme at the International Business Aviation Council.
“Last year, there were more than 1,800 inspections on aircraft across the network, and there were roughly 1,100 findings raised,” he explained. These issues, he added, are often related to outdated manuals, unreported technical defects, inaccurate passenger briefing cards and weight-and-balance errors, all procedural problems.
Karas also warned that the nature of business aviation exposes operators to greater harm in a zone of GPS interference that can extend from Northern Europe to the Middle East. He urged operators to fold official bulletins and conflict-zone advisories into formal risk assessments.
Operators should also be attuned to global fuel supplies, said Doug Carr, NBAA senior vice president, safety, security, sustainability and international affairs and webinar moderator.
“Reaching out to your fuel handler or to your ground service provider in advance to understand fuel availability over the next four to six weeks will be as helpful as it has always been,” he noted.
International Business Aviation Council Ltd.