Peter wrote:
Greece paid a high price for getting the €€€ loans from N Europe!
Still handlers make good income from increased traffic, so Greece will survive without airport fees which are lower than handling service, even for the big aircraft.
Emir wrote:
Still handlers make good income from increased traffic,
I am not sure the handlers actually make so much money. They charge us high amounts but then looking at the number of people they have on the payroll, on night shifts with weekend extra bonus etc. I am not sure. Just look at the parking. They could park the planes efficiently and make much more money on parking. But most handlers and airports still do not do it.
petakas wrote:
Most airports, be it public(CAA) of Privatized (Fraport), have no more than 1~3 GA parking spots.In summer periods, parking at Greece’s aprons has an extreme peak in demand, way beyond their capacity.
For some airports with small tarmacs and huge jet traffic in summer, this can be accepted as possible. For all the others, it is total b.s.
First of all, and that is not limited to Greece, one way of making parking scarce is to start painting yellow lines for “GA” planes to fit at least a Falcon 50. From 20 spaces to fit our small GA you go to “2-3” in no time with this tactics.
Furthermore many airports have plenty of space in “dead” areas of the airport, prime example Corfu which has an apron west of the runway which imho is not used for anything. All that would be needed is either a small GA shack with an Avgas pump and if necessary security and you’d have a great space to park at least 20-30 GA planes. But no, Kerkyra such as many others have decided that GA is not worth the hassle so they have outpriced and thrown us out.
Rwy20 wrote:
The EU Commission’s latest July infringements package
The EU should finally get their act together on the fact that:
- Greece violates the customs union provisions by forcing people onto customs airports when flying in from the EU.
- Greece also indirectly violates Schengen by the same, even tough the latter is not explicit. (The reason they give is customs, see above) .
If the EU is not capable to enforce even it’s most basic principles, then what keeps other countries from starting such stuff as well?
Already the possibility to use Meghara and similar non-entry airports directly would be a tremendous step forward.
These things all pre-date Fraport’s takeover though.
Fraport’s main “achievement” in Greece has been to show to the Greek locals that screwing visitors (financially and procedurally) is an honourable practice. And since Fraport took over only “airline” airports, there are no financial repercussions in doing stuff to GA.
Just come back from a small trip in Greece.
En route to LGIO I had to divert to LGKR due to strong winds . I paid 127 € of landing fees . Not cheap but I was afraid to pay more.
Going back to Italy we stopped in LGIO and I’d say that more tha the 100 € less in fees I appreciate the time saving . Less than 1 hour in LGIO and more than 2 in LGKR .
LGKR just last week with an Avanti cost €3366 including €2480 for use of the newly opened lounge.
Just ridiculous!
@ormazad it would be great if you could kindly do a report on our airport database. There is so much variable data on LGKR, and it seems to vary huge according to whatever factors.
€127 is very good based on other reports. How many hours did you park and what was your MTOW, etc?
Mooney_Driver wrote:
Already the possibility to use Meghara and similar non-entry airports directly would be a tremendous step forward.
Unfortunately, most/all on this forum don’t have the deep pockets to fight the AoE requirement and those with them aren’t here and just pay the price. A dream would be to have someone simply go and land at a place like Meghara or another non-AoE and then legally challenge any consequences on basis of EU law. But of course that needs someone with the desire and spare change to fund it. Unless EU law has more loopholes that the bureaucrats will admit.
Sebastian_G wrote:
look at the parking. They could park the planes efficiently and make much more money on parking. But most handlers and airports still do not do it.
Agree. One of the airports I fly to on occation last year issued NOTAM for a few month that you could not fly there in aircraft less than 2T MTOW because they didn’t want small airplanes due “limited parking”. Well of course they run out of parking spaces because they parked my TB21 on a stand made for an Airbus 320, because the yellow lines on the pavement told them so. On that apron you could have parked all the airlines and 20 GA aircraft if they used the space wisely. And If they had opened a small grass area next to the main apron (which was allready there) you could have another 15 GA aircraft parked with little to no preparation and effort. They wouldn’t even need the 1 meter thick concrete like on the main apron made for CATs. Same problem in Greek airports and many other places. Its seams like when CAT moves in along with handling companies, common sense toward GA moves out.
Peter wrote:
Brussels couldn’t care less.
Problem at times are countries not willing to implement the EU regs and then that has to go back through EU court, and then loopholes are found. Is that EU to blame or the membership countries? Same thing in Denmark where we had that ridicules “temporary” border control towards Germany for many years even if both countries are in Schengen. And aviation related, EASA reg aircraft could not be based in Denmark without putting on OY-REG even though EU says they can. List of this kind of non-compliance goes on and on. Yes sometimes EU has more luck putting pressure on large companies than member states.
Anecdotally, it seems to me that Fraport have managed to almost totally kill Greek internal GA ops at the airports which Fraport took over.
Even more anecdotally but still clearly, most Greeks who were in GA say 10 years ago have packed up.
I wonder how many people here still fly to Greece. My last trip was 2 years ago. I will go again, but fortunately I did most of the islands with runways in the good old days before the “fun” started…
