Is the GA aircraft owner profile changing? A gradual decline in "touring" GA.

Peter wrote:

OK so around 5% going outside Denmark. Are you able to get any breakdown indicating private flights? IOW, exclude training flights.

Looking at where EKRK is, 5% going cross-border is very very low.

Well I guess what we are looking for here is not absolute numbers but rather the trends, if I understand the thread topic correctly? You can see example of the split from July this year below and local trafic covers all kind of local flights including vast majority of school flights. And yes there is a lot of school flight, local and domestic flights which make the % of international flights looks small.

The numbers on international traffic looks to be trending up though. And since EKRK does not really have any CAT trafic this is all GA.

Statistics can be found here

Training is almost totally decoupled from “going places”

In Europe.

Peter wrote:

Training is almost totally decoupled from “going places”.

Well, one has to do one 150 nm flight for the PPL. Maybe that requirement could be increased? I spent about 10 hrs of my PPL just randomly flying around to reach the 45 hrs minimum, including doing another solo 150 nm flight, and those 10 hours could of course have been spent on a “touring” like training flight. Of course I know that other pilots might actually need those 10 hours to reach a level fit for the exam flight.

The club I trained with actually invited all student pilots to come along for a “flying camp” in France as one such touring activity, though I couldn’t attend for work reasons…

Emir wrote:

Yesterday I landed to Roskilde EKRK and I was amazed with quantity of traffic there – more than on Croatian CAT airports. Although the majority were training flights there was a lot of other GA traffic as well. Two perpendicular runways, ILS approach on each runway, RNP approaches, low fees, lots of parking place, no PPR (just 1 hour PN for international flights for which is sufficient to submit flight plan what you would do anyway) – it looks like GA paradise to me. Not that it proves anything but it would be nice to get feedback from Denmark, Sweden, Netherlands, Germany, Czechia, Poland etc. to check whether GA is in decline.

Personally, I love Scandinavia as a GA destination too, including Norway and Sweden, at least so far I’ve seen yet. But not a single European country comes with a downside. Denmark has still quite a lot of airfields, which are PPR outside AFIS hours. Avgas availability becomes more and more of a problem in Norway. And as for Sweden, Swedavia airports are expensive and other airfields have sometimes intransparent PPR requirements and/or unknown fuel availability. Having the KSAB Swedish Airfields Trip Kit makes life a bit easier, but it’s only available in Swedish (at least in Skydemon).

Germany has the famous “Flugleiter” requirement, which makes operations outside regular opening hours or at grass fields often complicated, especially during the week and/or during winter times. Even some bigger GA airfields open at 10 am, which is way too late, or already close at 6 pm. On the other hand, Germany has many nice airfield restaurants, active club life, cheap landing fees (except some major airports), extremely good fuel availability (both Avgas and Mogas), and slowly but surely more kind of courtesy cars, for example, App2Drive, which is great to go and see places.

France is maybe the best European GA country I’ve encountered yet. Almost never PPR requirement, low to no landing fees, good fuel availability (if you have a Total and/or BP carnet card), many aerodromes to choose from etc. But in return, you’ll get French-only at some airfields. If you want to have lunch, you need a reservation at the airfields restaurant up front (“Restaurant PPR”). And even worse: French GA aerodromes have usually no public transportation nearby. Good luck on finding an (expensive) taxi ride… Especially on Sundays, it’s next to impossible! If you want to go out and see places, France requires a decent “how to get from the airfield to the town” planning. Something I’ve never to worry about in Switzerland, with public transportation almost everywhere nearby. But Switzerland (and many other countries) comes again with other downsides…

In the end, the grass on the other side is not greener.

Fuel.
A return trip from the south east UK to Cannes
Is £1200.00 in fuel plus landing, handling, accommodation, and eating out.
That’s all before you (which you should try to never do) add aircraft hourly rate. £300/hr?
.
Then you end up on the ‘merry-go-round’ of …….“oh well, you need a cheaper aircraft sir”
Yes, but that comes with less dispatch, unless you can easily swap and pick your days, and can afford the risk of getting stuck. So round & round it goes. I’ve got probably 2 years left, maybe max 2 years?
I’m not gonna print my actual total calculated hourly cost because you’ll all choke on your beer.
There are a couple of capable aircraft that may be a little cheaper to run, but I couldn’t get any of those when I tried for a year.

A return trip from the south east UK to Cannes is £1200.00 in fuel plus landing, handling, accommodation, and eating out

Can you beat that in a car? fuel, eurotunnel and autoroute fee you will be north of 1000£…what about airline tickets to Nice for 4pob and then taxi or car rental to Cannes? it’s expensive to go on vacations but if one can offset some flying it’s even better

I went UK recently: 4pob in 4 days, we paid 600£ for 4 days in (cheap) hotels, 400£ in (expensive) car rental and few costs here and there, the flying budget was tiny: 80L of Avgas plus 100£ for parking & landing…in the other hand, I have done one week vacation trip down to Morocco 4pob, I think fuel was 2k£ other flying fees around 500£, the accommodation and food were free…

I think there is cut-off based on flying distance?

I fly my aircraft near 20mpg (120KTAS on 6GPH) on straight line where my car does 50mpg on zigzag usually “fuel plus route bills” are roughly similar (sometimes less in aircraft if we fuel in Jersey or Lydd), that is for marginal costs

For capital and fixed costs, I think sole ownership to be very expensive and comes with lot of hassle, I think sharing with other pilots or downsizing on aircraft helps…

France is maybe the best European GA country I’ve encountered yet. Almost never PPR requirement, low to no landing fees, good fuel availability (if you have a Total and/or BP carnet card), many aerodromes to choose from etc.

For outside of Schengen it’s practically everywhere 24+ hours PPR in France.

Hope you enjoyed your stay in DK?

I’m still enjoying – made a quick jump to Sweden, going back to Denmark and then home in few days. Coming from the country where trains are totally unusable to a level that people don’t travel by train between the cities, I’m always amazed how easy is to travel by train when it’s fast and reliable like in Scandinavia, Germany, France… In Croatia it takes for train on average 8 hours to cover distance between Zagreb and Split (some 400 km) but even that can be extended due to delays – I know about the cases when it lasted 12 or 16 hours.