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AIR BP refueling - big charges from 1st Jan 2021

Snoopy wrote:

What remains is a 60L minimum uplift.

If your tanks are full and the counter shows 58L, can you tell them to just dump 2L on the tarmac?

I can see both sides.
If the bowser operator is quiet and has other tasks assigned when not fueling, then there must be a measurable cost to direct him to a fuel task.
If he is a busy guy just fueling, then his time is more profitable doing larger fills than smaller ones.
Usually fuel is not hugely profitable in the smaller quantities GA uses.
I would think a minimum uplift to avoid a fee seems sensible to anyone likely to always uplift more than that minimum.
Obviously it’s very uncomfortable for anyone who’s regular operation is the ‘other side of the fence’
60l does seem quite reasonable to me. I can’t think of many times I’ve ever loaded less.

It’s a difficult situation and here in the UK where we are slowly being costed out of larger airfields it would be a small inconvenience to bear to retain access, but I fully understand the concern, and being based at somewhere where this is an issue really is unfortunate in the very least.
It’s excellent to hear that pressure was able to gain at least a favourable change, though not a return to old.

United Kingdom

Airports should be using normal ground crew / fire crew to drive the bowser. Then you don’t have people wasting their time.

At LFAT right now, there is no fuel bowser because the driver wants a prior day’s PN.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

I would look at that “minimum uplift” from the other side:

A hookup fee makes full sense and is the most fair pricing model one could think of: Pay for what you get!

Independent of what the bowser driver does in his free time, it cost money to pay him for the time to drive the bowser to your plane, to prepare everything, etc. It also cost fuel for the bowser. Therefore instead of mixing these cost into the overall avgas price (which leads to the situation that people that need more fuel pay more although the bowser drove the same way) it is by far the better way to transparently price this service.

It then is just a gratitude to “good customers” to waive this fee in case of buying a certain amount of avgas – just like some airfields also waive the landing fee if you buy a certain amount of fuel.

Germany

Rwy20 wrote:

If your tanks are full and the counter shows 58L, can you tell them to just dump 2L on the tarmac?

The fuel guys in LOWG are a nice bunch. They probably have a better safety management system than most ga maintenance shops (for example, they take a picture of the fuel type placards on the wing each time when refueling jet a on a sep).

I don’t think they would dump it on the tarmac, but they’d find another solution to get to 60L.

always learning
LO__, Austria

@Sebastian_G wrote

I am a bit disappointed that no pragmatic self-serve solution seems to able to be found for those airports.

There are 5 or 6 of the „Mauser“ type fuel trailers at LOWG for Mogas and even Diesel from flightclubs, charter companies and ATOs.

It’s about 20k for the trailer, and rent to the airport (?).

I believe the problem could be approvals to act as a commercial vendor for fuel vs. strictly only self use.

In practice someone from the above groups comes airside with their personal car, hooks up the trailer, takes it to and fills it up at the nearest gas station and returns it. I don’t know if this constitutes some dangerous goods transport and if this is actually legal. From an economic point of view it must make sense though.

always learning
LO__, Austria

Snoopy wrote:

There are 5 or 6 of the „Mauser“ type fuel trailers at LOWG for Mogas and even Diesel from flightclubs, charter companies and ATOs.

It’s about 20k for the trailer, and rent to the airport (?).

Just as a Gedankenexperiment, I looked quickly at the tank solutions offered by Maul, such as the 2900L one that can be also installed stationary (and the three-in-one container solution would probably be very nice as well). Attaching a payment terminal to energise the fuel release should not cost extraordinary amounts either (in the end rural gas stations manage with much lower marging on each litre sold, but of course a bit higher turnover), so the 100k number of Malibuflyer seems a bit high, I would have expected 20k-30k for such an installation (single 2900L + payment terminal). I obviously grok that neither the airport nor the fuel vendor can run as a charity, but if you don’t need a full-time fuel attendant the investment probably pays for itself after the first or second year.

EHRD / Rotterdam

To change from non self service Total to a Self Service Total AVgas fuel pump, as I have written before, we were quoted circa €60,000.
On top of that someone would still have to be responsible for ordering fuel, seeing it in, and regularly checking the filtration system and the specific gravity, and changing the prices on the fuel pump every time the price goes up or down.
The fire extinguisher equipment also has to be in place, maintained and inspected regularly, also at a cost.
So our saving would be that an unpaid volunteer club member would not need to be present to refill aircraft that just happen to pop in.
With the amount of Avgas we dispense and with the margin made it would take many more than 2 years to get such an investment back.Even though we have 2 very busy maintenance facilities on our airfield. We also have regular high level intensive 1 and 2 week aerobatics training courses a few times a year.
The amount of Avgas sold has also reduced a great deal since the club bought its DA40 tdi.
For that we installed our own diesel reservoir and pump for club use only (can’t remember the cost). This is refilled as needed.(I am not sure whether our contract is with Total or a small independant supplier.)
So if we have say 1000 litres of diesel in our reservoir and say 3000 litres (just a figure plucked from the air) in the Avgas reservoir, the club has had to put upfront running stock costs alone of around €8000, not insignificant for a small club.

France

[The following not aimed at clubs, but at businesses established at airports where the likes of Air BP and Total operate quite profitably]

OMG, People who want to earn money selling fuel have to do some work and invest to do it, shock horror! The poor things! Oh, the humanity!

The reality is quite simple. Airports are local monopolies, and handlers as well as fuel suppliers are monopolies on these airports, or at best two suppliers with no competition; and the oil and fuel industry have in the past aptly demonstrated subtle and not-so-subtle tendency for price fixing.

A monopolist prices in a way that maximises his profit, and the only things that make them lower their prices is (a) regulation and (b) being at a point where further price increases actually lower profits.

So the only way this will change is if the airports kick them because they are losing landing fees from certain aircraft (regulation), or because they realise that they can sell more (with next to no variable cost except the fuel itself) by changing prices.

Biggin Hill

@gallois, how much would this improve if your airfield had Customs/Immigration?

The bottom line is that GA airfields make c. €0.30 / £0.30 per litre on 100LL, which is quite a lot of money. It is 5x to 10x more per litre (depending on who you ask, and there is a tendency for people to disingenuously talk about net profit because it makes them sound much more charitable ) than petrol stations make, but of course they turn their stock around much faster.

So how to get the volume up? If say your GA scene is mostly flying day trips, people will probably not be buying much fuel when away from base (unless yours is significantly cheaper). So how to attract what is called “passing trade”? French airfields which lost Customs/Immigration in the two big waves in the past decade have reported a 30-50% loss of business, so maybe approaching the local police? People passing through will buy way more fuel, because almost nobody stops for fuel unless they have to. But then TOTAL is no good; you need to accept normal credit cards.

Various previous threads on this – example. A new fixed installation will almost never make sense. Certainly not below ground; I know someone in the business and even for petrol stations the costs are silly due to compliance (it is still done, due to lack of space). Above ground is the only practical way and a mobile bowser is the best way.

The problem here may be elsewhere, however. If you host a TOTAL or AIR BP franchise, how much do you make per litre? One sees this play out in Greece. If AIR BP turn up, they finance the whole installation. But the airport isn’t going to get anywhere near €0.30/litre.

In most business scenarios, total independence is the best way. That way you make the most money, as well as having the fewest people screwing you around. And anybody can buy avgas in bulk. The gotcha is the investment. No free lunch

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom
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