I would like to put my five cents in. I do appreciate the approach of @dublinpilot and to support marketing for the the to main fly in dates I recommend to give them a overall topic which should be maintained over the years, to make it unique and make people talk about. I.e.:
Spring fly in might be the „islands fly in“. That means it doesn‘t matter where in Europe, Scandinavia or the UK we are going, destination will be an island.
Autumn fly in might be the „discovery a secret place fly in“. That means we are going to a (for many pilots in the community) unknown place because away of the usual spots and therefore maybe a bit more challenging (I.e. mountains, grass runway, short field etc.) Although not everybody will be able to participate it will be interesting and a fly in like the LECD fly in this year doesn’t have to be postponed, because the pilots will know that it might be more challenging to go there, and will prepare for it.
Peter wrote:
We need to go back to that, and to the old format of Ryanair Dublin → Gatwick and then you and I fly out of EGKA like we used to in the good old days
I’d love to 
The spring one is easy for me. I’d jump at any such offer 
The Autumn one is much more difficult for me as work wise, 1 Sep to 25 Nov is very busy for me. I can really only take time off in the last week of Sep or first 2 weeks of Oct which doesn’t fit very well with the fly ins unfortunately.
Great points, Dublinpilot.
The “theory” is still as before i.e. fly-ins in May and September. Then Aero EDNY serves as the German fly-in, with a guaranteed big group; maybe this is a mistake because it gets diluted by people who are there but have other commitments.
The Oct 2021 one to Andorra was really great in every way and thus we decided to try another one this year. Maybe this was a mistake because all the previous ones failed miserably, with the exception of Burgos in 2016. Why Burgos and Andorra worked so well, I don’t know. Well, Aart drove the Andorra one, and when nearly everybody dropped out at a late stage (it happened there too!) he found some new people.
However a number of the Burgos crowd are out of flying now, permanently. Post covid, some more have gone for ever. A bit of this ?
The reason there originally wasn’t a forum thread on LECD 2022 was because it was an experiment to see if one can somehow avoid the situation where say 50 people join the telegram group, most stay silent but still x talk about going, the airport tells us they cannot park x aircraft, and then the whole thing falls apart – like Montenegro 2019 practically did due to that.
I think the best way to do this is hands-on monitoring of the numbers, with a regularly updated spreadsheet, and removal of anybody who has “gone silent” (those people never turn up). I am sure this is what the “€400 fly-in” organisers do; no money → you get chucked off the list.
You did great work on the PDF flyers and those meetups went very well. We need to go back to that, and to the old format of Ryanair Dublin → Gatwick and then you and I fly out of EGKA like we used to in the good old days
Let me make a small observation as a non-attendee. (My geographic location combined with my limited flying budget make flying to most of them beyond me. – A return trip to just Cherbourg would be about €1,500 for aircraft rental alone & most of the flyins are much further away from me than that).
So as someone who is never really in the mix for attending, I notice a lot of posts and threads about flyins. Enough that I wonder if people “can’t see the wood for trees”.
I mean if there is a post every few days about a flyin (which there seems to be) maybe people stop reading them (as they assume it’s the same one that they’ve already decided that they aren’t going to), and they don’t pick up on the fact that it’s a new one.
Some of you might think “Come on….we only have 2 flyins per year! How hard can it be?”.
But it seems that there are posts about flyins all the time. Many of these aren’t actually the big “forum flyins”, but rather what we call “impromptu flyins”. In other words someone is going somewhere at the weekend and asks if anyone else is going? To make it sound better they call it a flyin. Then because there are lots of those small ones, people don’t notice the big ones so easily.
Someone recently posted in the telegram group asking something about “the flyin next week”. My first reaction was “there is none!”. But of course there was. For me it was mentally lost in all the smaller Le Touquet etc meetups. (Admittedly I’m not the target audience).
Maybe we could fix this a little by being careful about our terminology. Just like how we distinguish departure and take off and are careful which one use, maybe we could call the Summer and Autumn flyins “Flyin” and the ‘trying to create an impromptu meeting’ we could call “meetup”. It might help distinguish things.
Also for a few of the earlier flyins on the forum, I made up a pdf “Brochure” for the flyin. Just something giving the date, some photos of the area and some details of some of the tourist attractions in the area. My thinking was two fold.
1. It give a little more of a positive impression of the destination than simply a name and airport code.
2. It might give some who want to bring their spouse, a little something to base the conversation on. They get an impression for where the place is and what to do there. They get the idea of a mini holiday rather than a group of ego filled pilots sitting around a table talking about aeroplanes all day.
I’ve attached the one I did for Carcassonne and Brac in 2016 by way of example of what I’m talking about.
I don’t know if they made any difference in attendance numbers, but if I had a little notice, I’d be happy to try and put one together for the next flyin.
Yes, a more central location is a good idea. France and SW Germany are ideal.
We can try something more centrally like France (e.g. Annecy LFLP) or Germany (we did Dresden once and it was ok).
Yes; most people silently wait to see how many are possibly coming. Which reminds me to do a spreadsheet and regularly post it. It is anonymised for names.
Those events were also central-Europe, which helps. We could do that also.
Some have an alternate date, others not.
All these had been set within the period of the year with higher chances for VFR weather. Which is ok and which should be general rule if you want VFR pilots to attend.
I was ready to attend this fly-in 3 weekends in the row but this one would be pretty tough due to some family obligations. For the original date I was already in Spain and despite a lot of complications for return flight I was able to make it. Next two ones I was ok despite getting Covid in the meantime. And even this one I was ready to cut my weekend in Scandinavia but with only 2-3 aircraft coming I decided to drop out.
We’ve done this before in another thread.
Dan – you are unusual; you are one of those who have time, money, determination, knowledge, 100% access to aircraft, and freedom. You are one of the “doers”. One of about 1% of people in GA.
I am one of the “doers” too; I’ve spent my whole life building myself a life of freedom and independence. If you want to book a lunch with me in 3 weeks’ time – no chance! Because then that whole week is gone.
But most people don’t have the flexibility.
And when organising a fly-in, one has to include all the others too. And this is mostly not successful.
VFR versus IFR is not a big thing enroute. IFR, I might fly at FL160. If you can’t do it VFR (due to Class A, ATC policies, etc) you can go at low level, which I generally won’t do. But you get there as much as I get there. We just use different tools. What I can do is get out of a Class D airport in OVC003, but you can’t The solution is to do a fly-in to an airport which is OCAS and has no ATC (or is in UK Class G)
The trick is to get large numbers to start with, and some magic ingredient to make people value it.
The events you mention benefitted from a massive solidarity factor. A mixture of type solidarity and probably a bit of national solidarity, and energetic organisation of the event via social media specific to these communities. Some also charge: Cirrus charge around €400!! And they have a full time organiser in Germany, which also guarantees both type solidarity and national solidarity. We don’t have that; we are just a pan-European GA forum with no type specialisation or country specialisation. I run the forum but in general nobody else is organising stuff. And even if we had a full timeperson who “hassles” people, we wouldn’t get more unless we charged money – IMHO.
Not sure where we go from there. Probably more promotion, well ahead, but that still limits one to airports which don’t care about how many turn up. Popham once had (they claim) 600 ULs.
Well, I know, I already had my rant…
Still, I’ll take my risks with these observations, please draw your own conclusions.
This is a list of the fly-ins attended in 2022. Of note, I missed 2 fly-ins, mid-Summer, thanks to my little tour.
Almost all of these were mainly for homebuilts. All of these have dates set well in advance, most being published in the excellent Calendar of Events RAC. Some have an alternate date, others not.
And the most important, 99.9% of the people attending these fly-ins do so by flying VFR.
Shields are now being raised as I push the red Submit button
