They aren’t making money because over regulation and taxation has reduced the volume of activity at normal GA airports to almost nothing. The lack of money and opportunity then makes for antisocial behavior, fighting over the crumbs, and any ripple like a period of inflation creates a crisis. The analogy with former European communist states is a good one except it’s not really an analogy, it’s the same thing.
Having said that, zero regulation is not the answer either and I agree that there need to be legal prohibitions on discrimination against small and/or private aircraft including ULMs, competent non-confusing airspace design and so on. Simple and effective beats complex, hierarchical and divisive every time.
Addressing a comment made above, the difference between ‘EU certified aircraft versus ULM’ and ‘FAA certified aircraft versus Experimental’ is that FAA regulations on operating the fleet of certified aircraft are not so draconian and incompetent that they have almost killed the activity, and FAA Experimental category is not a reaction to economic pressure on owning and operating certified aircraft. I fly a certified aircraft in the US largely because for my use it is cheaper than owning a comparable (although better performing) experimental equivalent. Also FAA Certified, Experimental and LSA aircraft all use the same airports, airspace and ATC simultaneously whether VFR or IFR, and there are no issues with IFR in an FAA Experimental aircraft. The different categories are not divisive.
Heard something this evening which is a little off topic but I found it amusing.
You may remember, a little while ago a story about the lady mayor of Poitiers trying to close the airfield and put the club there out of operation. Well it seems to have had the opposite effect. The number of hours flown has risen so much they are looking to get another aircraft and the number of new students who have signed up has the instructor’s wife complaining that he is never home.😀😀😀
Silvaire wrote:
They aren’t making money because over regulation and taxation has reduced the volume of activity at normal GA airports to almost nothing.
Not really. Most of the time, airports who shun GA are run by bean counters who mathematically correctly say that one airliner will bring in taxes and other incomes of some 100 GA planes, so they conclude that the amount of work necessary to keep the airport open due to partly self inflicted pre-conditions to keep it open is not worth the effort. The epitome of that is Greek airports who actually close outside airline flying hours despite e.g. having the tower manned. But also airports like Zurich or similar simply regard the money GA makes for them as not worth it but the ressources they feel it takes should be assigned to airline transport.
That is similar as if somebody running a toll way decides that one lorry will bring in 100 times the amount a normal car will, so therefore it was not worth keeping the motorway open for cars, just for lorries. Of course there is a law against that because motorways are legally bound to accept whatever traffic there is and obviously the big difference is that we are talking of millions of cars as opposed to maybe 100 small airplanes. And there are odd laws against banning GA either, so people who think so are going a different way, either by PPR or outpricing. And there CAA’s or EASA have little or no legal handle on.
Yet this is exactly the mindset which put people like the then owners of Samedan to suggest landing fees and actually implement other fees to the extent that the former roaring activity of small GA was reduced to very few. Likewise you end up with empty runways at places like Zurich which are kept for whichever airliner will eventually grace it with it’s 10k $ landing fee as opposed to the 30-50$ a lowly Cessna will pay. Zurich so far only partially succeeded in outpricing but far more effectively reduced GA by imposing slots which are few and unreliable to get. BTW both Samedan and Zurich were stopped by the FOCA when they wished to outprice GA via landing fees.
Croatia comes to mind, in particular places like Dubrovnik which used to be highly attractive but have become outpriced. And of course the Fraport Tragedy of Greece.
Silvaire wrote:
the difference between ‘EU certified aircraft versus ULM’ and ‘FAA certified aircraft versus Experimental’ is that FAA regulations on operating the fleet of certified aircraft are not so draconian and incompetent that they have almost killed the activity, and FAA Experimental category is not a reaction to economic pressure on owning and operating certified aircraft.
I agree, the comparison lacks. What I would say however is that the situation with experimentals vs certified in the US is largely a consequence of the tremendous certification hurdles and cost which have caused so far lots of established manufacturers give up or hang onto decades old type certificates, because almost all who tried failed or got bancrupt in the process. Columbia, Cirrus (who were driven into Chinese ownership) and several other failed certifications give testimony to that. Add to it the resulting outlandish cost of new airplanes. All this has lead to the Experimental scene becoming very attractive indeed, because most certification rules as well as liability protection insurance can be mostly avoided. It is also clear that what today is called experimental often stretches the 51% rule like a bungee cord… you know it’s gonna hold even though sometimes you wonder just how. For me, that is proof that either the tremendously expensive certification process for this cathegory of airplane is flawed or that there are a lot of airplanes which should not be flying. We all know the latter to be untrue with few exceptions, so my conclusion is that certification is one of the death nails of GA particularly in combination with liability insurace cost, despite the fact that the latter apparently was changed in recent years.
Experimentals and certified planes as you say correctly can use the same infrastructure in the US. However, that is not the case in Europe where they are not far away from being classed closer to ULM regulation than certified plane regulation. Still, ULM’s do take the thing a darn sight further. Both however are as big as they are because regulation involving certified aviation has become a cost driver and show stopper for almost all innovation and has relegated most people into the cathegory of window shoppers due to cost, whereas some ULMs and some Experimentals in the US are still somewhat more affordable.
“Normal GA airports” was the phrase I used, and by definition those are not generally being run by bean counters who have made a ‘business’ decision that light aircraft should be excluded by either ‘policy’ or exorbitantly high fees intended to intentionally push away business. Normal GA airports in Europe have a handful of operators per day because their would-be customers are priced and hassled out of aviation completely, by taxation and regulation, leaving those normal GA airports with so little traffic that the business is below critical mass and unsustainable. Meanwhile aviosuperfici and the like are at least sustainable in terms of volume because they operate under a different set of rules that wouldn’t need to exist if the rules for everybody were more reasonable and all forms of aviation were brought together operationally.
I think a challenge with that scenario in Europe however is that the status quo has existed for so long that even if the airspace, pilot certification, operational and maintenance rules and the (direct and indirect) taxes for operating and flying certified aircraft were more reasonable, there aren’t that many inexpensive, serviceable older certified aircraft available in Europe. You can’t boost the numbers of operations greatly without aircraft, so maybe a key starting point is to get rid of any legal prohibition of ULM operations at any airport – because those planes exist and would boost the numbers. Likewise certified aircraft should not be legally prohibited from operating at certain (ULM) airports for arbitrary reasons.
My base has 600 operations per day of everything from autogyros to Gulfstreams, simultaneously, VFR and IFR. It works fine.
I would agree that virtually any public use airport should be legally mandated to take virtually any traffic, without arbitrary discrimination based on aircraft passenger capacity or ownership.
Well, GA in the form of UL seems to survive nicely in Germany.
https://www.aerokurier.de/ultraleicht/statistik-2021-ul-markt-im-hoehenflug/
The number one seller is a very attractive design (for those who are not too tall) and fast and efficient. At 200k€+ pretty expensive but this does not seem to be a big issue. Those with less to spend occupy the number 2 and 3 spots. Apart from new sales, I guess the used market must also be moving along nicely.
It would be interesting to compare this data, and the total number of UL and licenses, to the certified SEP segment. Maybe @boscomantico can shed some light on this.
Silvaire wrote:
“Normal GA airports” was the phrase I used, and by definition those are not generally being run by bean counters who have made a ‘business’ decision that light aircraft should be excluded by either ‘policy’ or exorbitantly high fees intended to intentionally push away business. Normal GA airports in Europe have a handful of operators per day because their would-be customers are priced and hassled out of aviation completely, by taxation and regulation, leaving those normal GA airports with so little traffic that the business is below critical mass and unsustainable.
What are “normal” GA Airports in your definition?
Those which do not impose restrictive PPR and outpricing are doing quite well here. That is why countries where there still are quite a few of those (primarily Germany, Switzerland, Austria and so on) are doing ok when it comes to smaller mostly VFR airfields. The problem starts if you want IFR and/or Night ops. Still, you get airfields which openly try (or tried) to outprice small GA, such as Samedan.
I know that in the US there are almost always alternatives to the airline airports, here however most of the time international airports with airline traffic are usually the ones which have AOE status, IFR and night ops. E.G. in Greece, there are practically no “normal GA airports” but tons of airports with 1 to 2 airliners a day but who still impose massive restrictions on GA on an empty tarmac.
Where there are viable alternatives to large airports it is not a problem if the larger airports do not encourage GA, but in the situation where you don’t have alternatives, it is.
I have no numbers at hand, aart. But anyway, all the numbers are very small. Not really worth talking about.
That current mini-boom (we are still looking at tiny volumes) is due to the 600kg-boom. It will be short I guess.
A nicely equipped VL3 is actually more like 280k. Huge amount of money.
The (few) people who buy them obviously like to think of them as serious airplanes. Yet with an easier maintenance regime. Would these buyers alternatively be certified aircraft buyers? Hard to say.
But being unable to legally fly them (without additional paperwork) to Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the UK, France, Switzerland, etc. will hinder them a bit, but not so much. After all, most customers from say Germany actually very rarely fly abroad.
What these high-end manufacturers sell is actually not airplanes, but dreams.
Bottom line: is GA in Europe doing reasonably well these days? A firm no.
Airfield politics. The Flight Shame Movement? With stuff like this doing the rounds we are dead.
The FB tracking tail on that gives it away 
I always trim those off.
You can find everything on FB…
boscomantico wrote:
What these high-end manufacturers sell is actually not airplanes, but dreams.
Absolutely. And that dream for most “north of the Alps” pilots is to fly somewhere warm S of the Alps.
boscomantico wrote:
Bottom line: is GA in Europe doing reasonably well these days? A firm no.
Agreed.
BeechBaby wrote:
The Flight Shame Movement? With stuff like this doing the rounds we are dead.
This stuff has been around since ever I can remember. We are still far from dead. In a way, the current shaming and cancel politics of many extreme couleurs are no going so much overboard with a lot of this, that quite a few “normal” folks start to opposed them or they start cancelling themselves out.
At the moment a lot of E-car owners are rubbing their eyes to hear that the big guru does not actually want them to own his products anymore, no, only rental and so on. This might crash Tesla’s dominance in the e-car market faster than anyone could imagine. Similar stuff happens elsewhere, people are tired of complainers. No noise, no kids, no cars, no planes, ask someone what disturbs them and you get “everything”?
What is true is that airplanes have always been an object of envy or often simply massive misunderstanding of what they are. And as a small group, they are ideal for activists to thump their chests about and point fingers at, as only a relatively small group of people (voters) gets upset.
