I’ve come across old UK airport data from 1973 onwards which makes some interesting reading:
It was most interesting to see the number of private and aero club movements at reporting UK airports in 2016 have approximately halved since 1973.
It was also interesting to see various private and aero club movements at the five major London airports in the 70’s.
Private flying seemed to be much more of a popular activity back in the day – and even more so given the UK’s population has grown almost 20% since then!
Yes there was a lot of GA activity at these places, and except for Heathrow which is really busy, and Gatwick which is busy parts of the day, there still could be – if the airport management had not handed exclusivity on “GA” to the handling cartels like Harrods or Signature who set out to extract max money out of bizjets (£3500 for a CJ4) and screw everybody else…
I can see PPL training would not work anymore simply because a school would not make money at an airport which prevents GA flying for hours at a time, but they could allow light GA to use it for some “reasonable for an H24 airport” price of say £50 for a TB20. Sell slots from a website, etc… But the cartels won’t have any of this…
