Airfields at risk: the right management model?

How would it help if you knew where the funding came from for an airfield such as eg Cherbourg?
It would be easy enough to find out if it was really necessary, bit publishing the finances might have the opposite effect to what you might hope.🙃

I think that we all need to understand that aerodromes are not financially viable as businesses with just light GA landing fees as their source of income, and they require other income streams if privately owned, but then Aerodromes should be part of national infrastructure just like roads. This is why so many UK aerodromes are being turned into housing estates by their developer owners, their value is as a land asset for building, not as an airport for aeroplanes.

Regards, SD..

How would it help if you knew where the funding came from for an airfield such as eg Cherbourg?

I fully understand that an airport getting funding from a local chamber of commerce, or from the govt as a subsidy to keep open for rapid access to a nearby nuclear facility (either of which may be politically embarrassing, especially the former, for an airport which is almost dead largely as a result of police “work minimisation” action), will not want to disclose these income sources, but it would help us understand how these things work, or don’t work.

We should probably be grateful that many airports have hidden income streams… but it is a risky system.

This is why so many UK aerodromes are being turned into housing estates by their developer owners, their value is as a land asset for building, not as an airport for aeroplanes.

Many years ago I was at a presentation by a DfT minister who said the classification will be changed. It wasn’t. And you know why? Under the table, the landowners lobby hard to maintain the value of the land for sale to a housebuilder. Under the table. It protects their investment – even if they have no present intention of selling up.

chflyer wrote:

Just a thought ….. this thread seems to be concentrating on a “glass half empty” approach.

Well, the thread title is looking for threats and therefore it’s hardly surprising that it’s biased towards those.

To keep with the “glass full/empty” methaphor, it strongly depends what someone is looking for. For you and me, based in Switzerland, there are massively different outlooks, depending on what we want.

Pilots who fly VFR only and who are totally content to do the usual 100$ burgers or occasional round trips to other VFR destinations within Schengen the glass is near full I’d think. We have a great many airfields we can fly to and from, pretty good infrastructure on those airfields and most have the possibility to fly within the Schengen area without too much difficulty.

The moment we are talking IFR, things go downhill fast, particularly if you need major airports like ZRH, which will for all practical purposes cease to exist as a base at the end of this year. Likewise, MANY IFR airports in attractive areas but de facto must use destinations (e.g. for customs/immigration and so on) present a real problem in terms of airport access/outpricing/PPR e.t.c. For someone who focuses on those things, the glass is not only half empty but quite often practically dry.

I fully agree that threads like this do not help GA in the sense that they are very negative by their very nature to anyone thinking of joining in, but nevertheless, unless those things keep being addressed (by whom I really don’t know anymore) we will end up in a situation where any airports which have a Ryanair a day will deem it perfectly ok to shut down GA and live of their single schedule. That must not happen,otherwise we will see more and more destinations become unavailable.

In my view, there are two major points regarding airport access which should be addressed on a regulatory level as well as on political levels as well:

- Airports which present the only option to reach an area and for which no viable alternates exist within a reasonable range should be declared vital infrastructure and forced to accept GA at acceptable rate, without PPR b.s. and without hassle such as obligatory handling e.t.c. The criteria for viable alternates would be similar opening hours, AoE facilities, IFR and night.
- The effort of GA lobbies and Ga operators should be to identify possible and potential alternate airports in such centers and try to resurrect / get to use them. Primarily this may be ex military fields or city airports having been replaced by newer hubs where a use of a portion of their infrastructure might be fully sufficient for GA.

It is a great pity that many of such occasions have been missed or spoilt by local politics, such as Dübendorf or Fürstenfeldbruck in Munich. Other former military fields such as e.g. Memmingen show that it is very well possible to use such infrastructure very successfully. Also in Bulgaria, some former military and agricultural sites have been developed into lovely little airports in recent years, with a strong GA lobby and an interested CAA trying to facilitate such projects as much as possible, quite the contrary to what is going on in other parts of Europe.

One possibility may even be to combine the use of such facilities with solar farms e.t.c. Some former airbases have indeed been converted to such solar farms, but it would have been possible to leave out part of the runway and taxiway structure for GA use while still use large portions of the land for solar power generation. Similarily, many of those airfields have huge capacity to be used for industrial or office space, with often large complexes of buildings standing emtpy in the day and age, where many people find it difficult to find space to work and live. in such cases, it would quite viable to finance the airfield via renting out of such buildings as business or habitable venues to interested parties, the latter under clear agreement that no opposition would be taken to the airports use.

The other factor that many of those

Glasses can be empty or full but they are hardly ever so in a permanent manner. But to pursue it needs relentless lobbying, which, in Europe, has been a pretty sad story often enough.

skydriller wrote:

This is why so many UK aerodromes are being turned into housing estates by their developer owners, their value is as a land asset for building, not as an airport for aeroplanes.

Don’t you have problems will polluted soil at old aerodromes? We’ve had cases in Sweden where airports have been shut down for industrial development, but never, AFAIK, for housing development. The cost of removing pollutants would be too high.

(Well, ok, Tullinge ESCN and Barkarby ESKB were shut down partially for housing development, but I would think the reason was just as much to remove a noise source to open up neighbouring areas for housing.)

Some ex mil ones have had polluted soil, yes. I don’t know how it was cleaned up. I recall that some can’t be cleaned up, which is good news.

Mooney_Driver wrote:

But to pursue it needs relentless lobbying, which, in Europe, has been a pretty sad story often enough.

This is so accurate. While in my younger days I tried to avoid any kind of politics, I have come to learn, sadly about 40 years too late, that politics is the most effective way to affect change.