From here
and a few posts down in that thread
Dan wrote:
There are obviously different categories of wealth displayed here on EuroGA…
Should I have to sell my airplane now […], I could expect it to reach say €100K.
Assuming 1 landing and 1 night stay = €55. Now dividing the value of my airplane by 55 equals 1818. This being of course a simple ratio of an airplane’s value against the price of 1 landing + 1 parking.
OTOH posters finding these fees of good value will fly there with an aircraft easily worth 10X, or much more, the value of mine. The ratio will definitely be different…
Peter wrote:
it is impossible to run an airfield for a €10 landing fee
The two single biggest threats for the continued existence of GA in Europe are
- The (mostly fake and hugely biased) environmental case (this one for another thread, please)
- Airport access
As to the latter, it is clear the current management and financing model has to be rethought. There is probably no one-size-fits-all solution but what we have today which are the following types:
The majority of light GA occurs on 3 and 4 and those are the management models at high risk and to be rethought. Am I leaving major cases out?
I fully agree re the major threats to GA.
The environmental case is probably highly variable in impact per country. but you are right, that is for another thread and also not limited to aviation.
Airport access is a huge problem indeed.
The “problem” most airports who want to get rid of GA have is that according to their license they can’t simply put “no GA” into the AIP without violating the law. So they outprice, either via huge landing fees or, where CAAs won’t allow that, handling and imagined cost.
2. I would expect that within the next few years being priced out or hassled out via PPR and handling will become standard.
3. Depends strongly on the airport and it’s management. If they are pro-GA they will try to justify keeping GA on acceptable price level. Others will try to outprice them anyway and just open them for scheduled flights or “worthwile” traffic (see Greece).
4,5,6 are the airports which remain for us to use. The main problem with those is that many of them are VFR only and limited in terms of airport of entry clearances.
2 and 3 still are very important and I think the fight to keep them accessible to GA is very necessary, particularly if there are no alternatives around. While it is quite possible to fly e.g. in the Frankfurt area using several smaller airports without too much impact avoiding EDDF, by now there are many airports which the only airports in a given region and do not have alternatives, yet GA is still priced out or hassled out.
It appears to me that particularly the airports mentioned under 2 are in many cases a lost cause, so the priority should be to open alternatives. E.G. LSZH will be pricing out GA from 2024, which leaves the IFR crowd high and dry. While there are some airfields around (LSZK, LSZF,) there is no GA accessible IFR airport nearby. This situation is similar for places like Dubrovnik, Munich, many Greek islands, Baleares and so on. My take on that is, that airports which are the only ones serving a certain area or landmass should be forced to accept GA at acceptable rates.
You did not leave anything important out safe maybe a scenario 7 with privately owned airfields which do not accept or heavily restrict non-based traffic. EDXO comes to mind or several in Switzerland too. They imho do nothing to support GA other than their own little flock.
Peter wrote:
it is impossible to run an airfield for a €10 landing fee
The airfield I learned to fly at charged no landing fee at all. Unusually for an airfield in the US, it received no taxpayer funds (and paid quite a lot in property taxes to the city) and was privately owned public use. Yet it was a sustainable operation.
Its income was based on:
Notably different from most European airfields of a similar size, and what made it more sustainable:
Why can’t the same be done in Europe?
Aha – I found that thread I was looking for: here.
For sure, commercial property will do it nicely.
The rest (like fuel sales) needs a certain level of activity, which in turn depends on the locality, stodge sales, flight training, etc. H24 ops is also not possible in many countries here.
Funnily enough in the UK you can have H24 with PCL (subject to no local objections) but at the same time the UK has an active “boycott everything above say £20” social media population, historically led by Flyer and the now almost defunct Pprune. Those two sites did huge damage to GA over 20 years, and this saboteur group has since moved to FB. I’ve been fighting this lot for 20+ years…
The fundamental issue is that most people in European GA want to freeload from someone else, are not willing to pay for security of tenure for their plane (or don’t have a plane or any interest in a plane) and are fairly happy to just chuck it all in. No investment / stakeholding = no willingness to pay. If you read US social media, renting barely features. Most owners here will not pay even 10k for hangar access security, while they will pay way more for avionics eye candy.
There are quite a few airfields which do operate sustainable or even profitable. Most of them do charge landing fees, some have discounted fees for based airplanes.
The model works pretty much as your example: Rents (businesses and hangars), fuel sales, landing and parking fees and in some cases also parking fees for cars (which in some areas is compulsory) and so on.
10 Euro and below landing fees is rare, I’d say the normal fees are between 10 and 30 Euros. (1.2 T SEP).
alioth wrote:
Notably different from most European airfields of a similar size, and what made it more sustainable: available H24, no PPR, no BS to fly in our out. only had 2 full time staff and 2 part timers (the part timers were the teenage line boys) and 1 part time ground keeper, not a single yellow jacket in sight actively encouraged business (most UK GA airfields seem hell bent on turning business away)
Night flying is out in most European countries for small GA. H24 therefore only works in very rare cases. Even most international hubs have night bans. Reason being, the attitude of a very strong NIMBY brigade is that if you MUST fly, do it while they are at work or at least not asleep. Hence 99% of GA airfields in central Europe are Daylight only. Almost all airfields and airports have strong opposition groups, who would close them in no time if they could. So keeping the status quo is the prime goal of those airfields and therefore extending hours or similar stuff is mostly out of the question.
PPR is a plague which often unnecessarily keeps people away. The major PPR hurdle is customs and immigration. As many of our flights will mean crossing borders, almost all flights do have customs requirement.
There are quite a few airfields which are not permanently attended in Switzerland some of which have no full timers at all. That works quite well.
So it can be done in Europe, but with restrictions stemming from in most areas intolerance and large overpopulation. There simply are few if any airfields which do not impact a significant number of people.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
H24 therefore only works in very rare cases
It doesn’t even need to be H24 – just SR-SS would be a colossal improvement. So many airfields in the UK essentially keep banker’s hours, closing by 5pm. The airfield I learned at was not attended H24 (far from it), but when it was not attended, it was still not a problem to fly in or out. It’s just not necessary to have an airfield constantly supervised to function.
Contrast this to sailing, no one cares if you arrive at the visitor pontoon hours after the staff went home and there’s usually helpful instructions in case you arrive after everyone’s gone.
alioth wrote:
It doesn’t even need to be H24 – just SR-SS would be a colossal improvement.
most of ours do that, even though some close at 8pm or so.
alioth wrote:
when it was not attended, it was still not a problem to fly in or out. It’s just not necessary to have an airfield constantly supervised to function.
Yes, I agree. Quite a few in Switzerland work that way, some have no permanent staff at all.
Just a thought ….. this thread seems to be concentrating on a “glass half empty” approach.
How about a thread that is limited to “glass half full” comments? A list of airfields open H24, and/or no PNR/PPR, lights for night operation, etc. I think a lot would be surprised to know how many there really are around Europe. For example, there are quite a lot of airfields in France open long hours or even H24, often with lighting and even basic IAP. Many are manned by aeroclubs and/or open even when unmanned. Hangarage, PCL, and a self-serve fuel station can go a long way to breaking even if unnecessary costs are kept to a minimum. Some countries’ politics are more liberal than others, and the less densely populated ones have a better chance if only because there are often fewer neighbours to complain.
P.S. I don’t know how the funding works, but as an operational model LJPZ Portoroz is about as good as it gets for GA. Their biggest constraint is likely the lack of space for hangarage which could bring in a lot more $$$.
I think the problem is that little is known about where money comes from. If we could see the accounts for airports we could learn a lot. And this is possible for some of them if they run as a company. Unfortunately (country dependent) there is likely to be a small business exemption on what data is required to be published. In the UK, below IIRC £4.8M turnover you publish basically nothing.
I find it short-sighted if airfields are so secretive about their funding. I don’t mean publishing numbers down to the last detail. More active airfields means more potential customers and more business for everyone. Even just indicating a) profitable or not, b) sources of funding, c) breakdown of expenses, both b) and c) without specific details but rather item % like a pie chart would be useful information. That would reveal a lot and allow some good comparisons across airfield types and countries.
