We’ve had the covid effect which has very visibly wiped out a large chunk of the “going places” community.
That community is nearly all owners simply because you more or less need to be, or in a syndicate of say just 2 or 3.
However I think this started further back. When I did my PPL, 2000-2001, I got onto various forums. Today these have mostly died, or de facto died. These were full of people going places, all over Europe, and writing about it. And writing about their experiences e.g. difficult icing conditions encountered.
Then a number of things started to happen.
People stopped posting stuff which might get them into some kind of legal trouble. I was on one “private” forum 2005-2015 which was tiny – about 50 people only ever visited. Well, all closed groups are like that – just an echo chamber where you can be a God if you have a “big plane” and talk to yourself all day 
The forum there had a ton of interesting stories from years past. Then the sysadmin moved the forum to a new package and dumped the old posts. The old posts were visible on another URL but after a bit that was deleted. The new forum wasn’t half as useful, especially due to a) one “must have a war” character joining up and threatening legal action against xyz which made everyone forcefully realise it wasn’t a private site at all and b) the mod/owner was using it to run vendettas. By the time I went, nobody was writing anything interesting about flying, and it became clear to me from peripheral sources that actually not many “God” characters there were flying anymore. Maybe 30hrs/year… and many had not flown for a decade.
And same elsewhere – right across GA social media.
Then look at the actual airport scene. The traffic Shoreham to Le Touquet is doing just fine. Traffic to deeper in France has more or less died due to the French police “work minimisation campaign” (since ~2011) and 24hr/48hr PN at most places worth going to. Flight training is doing OK too, and “clubs” around Europe are doing OK too but almost none of them go anywhere. In some countries GA has collapsed to ULs flying around “below the radar” very freely but they also don’t go anywhere…
In 2000 flying was easier in planning terms. No GAR (!), no GENDEC, no airport PPR booking sites, no Fraport extracting money from most Greek airports. And – while one should be realistic about avgas cost versus landing fees – airports were nearly all very cheap. Biarritz €10… None of this is impossible but now you need to be quite keen to email several airports and wait for replies. Anyway, the challenges are a different topic.
I think the Big Thing is that the people who were flying a lot in 2000 were in their 50s or older. Now we are 20 years down the road and they would be 70+. Nearly all of them will be formally retired, and most retired people have pretty limited funds.
And these people have not been replaced.
Most of the “old” UK IR holders I knew got their IRs via what was called the “700hr route” which was a pretty big concession, pre-JAA. The UK was always a “low compliance” country (hence so many N-regs) while in say Germany many more had the German IR. Then JAA shafted the private IR route and only the hard core did it. In the UK, for a brief time, you had to do the 14 exams even for a PPL/IR. And later the CB IR has had extremely limited success, as can be seen from the increases in annual numbers. Well, that was expected, frankly… The CB IR was marketed as the great GA recovery pusher but it has totally failed, and concurrently the N-reg route (which was done primarily for the IR) has got harder due to various factors.
The above is all obvious from watching the GA scene.
Other indicators are the worsening difficulties in organising fly-outs over the past 5-10 years although I think covid is largely to blame. Why wasn’t there a post-covid recovery? Because a lot of businesses were destroyed, especially the smaller ones which were the dominant sector for private owner-pilots. Come to any of our fly-ins and you hear great stories. And a lot of people (with some spare cash) used the opportunity to re-evaluate their life and get out of working.
And it isn’t going to get better any time soon, due to Putin’s adventure.
[personal attack deleted] you make it sound like it‘s universal.
Again, in much of central Europe, Covid has not done a major harm to GA. Rather to the contrary, there have been many people who have got their PPL in that time. Of course, there are many „bucket list“ PPLers, as always, but some are becoming owners. And of those, some will of course want to travel. Which, in Europe, is much easier due to being inside Schengen. Many international flights don‘t even require a flightplan.
Whether these people want to socialize and do flyouts together is another topic. Many will yet have to find EuroGA…
And the economic downturn is now coming. That will likely do a lot of harm, but that is still to come.
I don’t think we disagree, but the PPL training activity (good here too, as I said) is no guide at all, and never was.
PPL training and what one might call “touring” are almost totally decoupled. They are for sure decoupled demographically – by some 20 years and you don’t need me to tell you why that is
The “wipeout” may be worse in the UK, and it probably is partly because the UK was always so big on European travel, but I see it everywhere I go around Europe. Formerly busy airports are just mostly empty.
Some very simple cross-border flights don’t need a flight plan but this cannot be a big factor since of all things the FP is trivial to chuck in. It is about the smallest of all fish to fry in GA.
GA social media – in Germany too – is almost devoid of the relevant activity, compared to 20-10 years ago.
Not my experience at all. At our owners club I know of one guy who quit because he’s lost interest. One gave back his license because he’s well over eighty but he’s still happy to get a lift. Many many others joined. At our airfield I know nobody who quit. A friend of mine left a syndicate but is looking for a new one. The club where I instruct at had fly-outs to France, Italy and Serbia in the last two years. I try to fly to France with each of my students at least once if I feel they are interested in going places.
IMHO flying is easier than it ever was. Not only there is no fpl needed to reach places to the east of Germany but also filing is just one click with e.g. SD. France has hundreds of fields you can fly to without PPR or calling ahead. That is VFR, of course but IFR always required a fpl and filing these is also easier than it ever was thanks to AR.
The decline in trip reports is rather an effect of this. Because it’s rather easy these days to fly all over Europe, there is not much to write about. I really try hard to to do write-ups here when there is anything to tell, but I struggle to write something when the story is „Flew to XX, had a chat with other pilots, had dinner and a beer, flew home“.
I see Peter’s point in several French clubs. We had a kind of great generation who learnt to fly in the 70s, flew a lot in the 90s and 2000s, and now retires to the cote d’azur for golf and boating. I wonder if, for them, house stuff was mostly taken care of by their spouse while today, we the husbands would even think about leaving the family to spend the weekend at the club. No surprise many of these club pillars divorced.
They did the club work (admin, mx, events etc…) and brought a lot of revenue, but now they are leaving.
The younger crowd still brings students, but as I wrote before, doing some meaningful flying is unreachable for most of them beyond the checkride. So most drop.
Myself I do the very minimum to keep my license and wouldn’t be available to do any significant club work. Without the support of my loved ones, I would consider flying altogether. The global situation makes GA a low priority for me. My family can live without it.
My experience is a bit mixed,
)Hopefully, I will turn up in one of the fly-ins when life give more headroom
None of this is impossible but now you need to be quite keen to email several airports and wait for replies. Anyway, the challenges are a different topic.
I tend to agree on that, weather and flying are way more predictable, they follow the laws of physics and are the least of my worries, the biggest hassle is on ground at airports these days: ppr, slots, no fuel, no visitor, notam…it’s a full-time job and sometimes you need few emails and few phone calls to arrange something
We’ve had the covid effect which has very visibly wiped out a large chunk of the “going places” community.
What are they doing, sold their aircraft? or flying locally? or not flying at all?
PPL training and what one might call “touring” are almost totally decoupled.
I think this is an interesting and equally true observation.
There are a couple of passionate new owners tinkering with 70‘s planes but the bulk is buying newer planes for big bucks. It’s completely detached from another.
What are they doing, sold their aircraft? or flying locally? or not flying at all?
If you lose your medical, your only options are in the UK (the PMD) or France (ultralights) and neither is usable for going abroad. Well, the PMD is OK for France in an Annex 1. So basically in most of Europe you are buggered, and most exit routes (especially cardio related – but those are usually fixable) cost well into 4 digits.
A key reason for getting bored is not having developed the social aspect of flying. This is why here we are constantly trying to do meet-ups, with variable success. Much discussion on that one…
I think my original point has to be similarly valid everywhere because of the “touring” demographic. Maybe not if your sample country is one where people in their 20s or 30s have loads of money, a vasectomy, and their partners/spouses love flying But I don’t know of any such country. Not even Zermatt
What would have made a difference, perhaps, would be an IR as accessible as the FAA one, flying in an airspace system and an “aviation universe” like the US. This will never happen in Europe, for many reasons. Even the first element – the IR – has been buggered.
Forgot to comment on this unwarranted personal attack, which is BS. Why post stuff like this? For enjoyment, I guess.
As usual, your views are heavily UK-centric
Bottom line is it feels like everyone have to work twice as much just to pay for the cost of living. Simply isn’t any time or money to go fly anymore and a polarization between the have and have-not’s. It’s either ULM or jet flying now – and very little in between.
It’s either ULM or jet flying now – and very little in between.
Maybe in Europe, not in my world.
