bribery
Wild speculations/hearsay, I assume.
Occasionally, there are a few pilots flying for such companies on here.
It is official but not in the AIP 
It is one of the functions of the handler.
Obviously, bizjet customers won’t be doing 48hr PN.
How do bizjet operators handle this situation with France? It precludes any short term jobs (or short term changes to flights, which happens every day…) ?
That is an interesting question indeed but I guess bizjet operators are allowed by aerodrome operators to make “timing & pax adjustments”, they rarely have to deal with customs directly themselves as handling usually mandatory for jets and handling agent does that job?
If you have handling you can make last minute planning changes without having to worry that much about getting fuel or customs (I did not bother letting handlers know I am coming late)
Without handling one has to be careful, especially if handling have arrangements with operations & customs
If landing in no man’s land without operations & handling, literally, no one cares about missing PN or changes…
Bribery tends to end badly in France as many notable French businessmen and politicians can testify to. Of course they all deny they did anything wrong.
For bizjets the same rules apply. However, there is always a work around if one is necessary.
It’s what bizjet crews are paid for.
Well, the name of the game in GA is to avoid handling at all costs. The price we pay for that is that we get exposed to all kinds of crap. People either don’t realise this, or don’t want to face it. Aviation (business and above) has for many decades not worked that way. They always use a handler, and his job is to “make it work”. It is his business to deliver the lubricant where needed and not cause the crew any hassle. GA doesn’t like to pay for this, so they face the full brunt of the often idiotic airport management, which doesn’t want to deal with GA not least because they get nothing out of GA. Often, the handler is the only place on the airport who speaks English…
Do you think a bizjet pilot, getting called at 11pm with “my wife wants to do a spot of shopping in Cannes tomorrow morning” is going to deal with this sh!t? Obviously not. He wants to shoot off an email to the handler, and fly.
So how does it work?
The answer is obvious. There is, ahem, a “procedure” 
We can debate what “procedure” exists, and inevitably this discussion, on an international forum, will involve “national” factors (god forbid calling it “nationalist” especially these days ) but there is obviously a procedure.
In Greece, PROB75, the handler pays off the airport manager. This is quite safe; much safer than expecting visiting pilots to pay the airport manager directly, like used to be the case in some places in the Mykonos/Santorini/Crete area When you turn up at some Greek airports, it’s completely obvious that half the officials there are looking for “lubrication”.
In France, I would not expect the airport manager to be getting a bundle of euros. It won’t be that Spanish African; not anymore, well not these days. Almost certainly the police has an official but unpublished arrangement with the handler, where say €200 is paid to the police, and only the handler needs to know about it. Where or who the €200 goes, we don’t need to know. It won’t be €1000 because that is more than a total CJ4 landing cost. In turn, the airport will have agreed to make life hard for traffic which avoids handling.
You could check this by contacting the handler. At LFBH you have to use handling to get hard parking, IIRC.
There is bribery and there is bribery. There is a spectrum from “total corruption” (most of Africa, India, etc) to “total transparency” (doesn’t exist, but good luck with paying off somebody in the US, or even the UK nowadays). Say you have to give a box of wine bottles to the mayor to get a permit for your barn conversion. That’s maybe halfway on the scale. Same with the good old days in the UK when a colour TV or a holiday in Benidorm would work here
I honestly don’t know what you are talking about.
I know several pilots who work in the business aviation field, and yes the majority of them use handlers. They also tend to use the more upmarket handlers, paying a little extra for the services they get for their passengers.
I know of no jet or turbine aircraft which are parked on the grass at LFBH it would not only be impractical but yes handlers probably pay the airport for a concession to operate there.
But there is also agreements with the clubs, the ATOs, the maintenance outfits and the people who rent space in the airport’s hangars.
I used to pull my aircraft outside of the hangar and would park it on the tarmac apron in front of the hangar. I used to pay for my slot in the hangar to which the town in later years decided to also charge a taxe foncière. Parking the aircraft outside the hangar for a few hours or even most of the day did not incur any charge.
But for visiting GA there is very little hard standing parking in front of the tower at LFBH and although I have never paid anything when I have I would not be surprised if some pilots paid extra as it is in short supply. Is the fact that I used to know most of the people responsible for parking space and would have coffee with them or the fact that the handlers tend to book the best parking space available in advance, in your mind, considered bribery?
There may well be occasions whereby knowing who to speak to at a bse. would help a bizjet operator or handler work around the 48hr PN.
But as long as it is done at a level open to everyone and as long as no backhanders are offered or accepted, I do not call this bribery.
In fact I have to say I have been guilty of this on more than one occasion, when I have forgotten to PN in the appropriate timescale. Sometimes, the PN timescale was no problem for bse. On other occasions I have had to make alternative arrangements.My experiences are mirrored by most of the operators of bizjet, and other aircraft used for business transport purposes that I know. Sometimes, one just has to ask nicely. The advantage the bizjet world has, is that within it there are usually many more personal contacts. But isn’t that what business is all about?
The bottom line is that if a pilot from a Schengen country outside France wants to fly to LFBH but can’t or won’t do a 48PN and don’t want to drop into a small French airfield with no PN on arrival and departure, go elsewhere.
I don’t believe it will have any effect on LFBH management, other than maybe eliciting a Gallic shrug if the even know of you.
The bottom line is that if a pilot from a Schengen country outside France wants to fly to LFBH but can’t or won’t do a 48PN and don’t want to drop into a small French airfield with no PN on arrival and departure, go elsewhere.
Brilliant!
I don’t believe it will have any effect on LFBH management, other than maybe eliciting a Gallic shrug if the even know of you
Nobody said that this has any effect on „LFBH management“. But us pilots should still fight this, whether this requirement is strictly illegal or not.
Sometimes, one just has to ask nicely. The advantage the bizjet world has, is that within it there are usually many more personal contacts. But isn’t that what business is all about?
I cannot believe I am reading this!
Ask nicely. Many more personal contacts. That is a total lack of social and corporate transparency and is just one tiny step away from bribery. Remember that if your “asking nicely” or your “personal contact” fails to deliver on the day, you are risking this.
Of course this is equivalent to bribery, because if you have a society where they publish a huge fine / prison sentence and have the brass balls to actually put this into the AIP but asking nicely etc gets somebody around this law, then the next person will convert it into a “business model” and do it for money.
Aviation, of all activities, is supposed to function as per the published regs, because a pilot flies to a foreign country, lands there, and the local police has got him and his plane by the balls. He can’t just walk out. We are vulnerable, so we need well defined regs, which are easy to find and which are reasonable.
Anyway, let’s stick to positives otherwise nobody will come to La Rochelle next month Maybe you @gallois can speak nicely to LFBH and ask them to waive the 48hr PN? These fly-ins work a lot better when the airport in on board, but I can’t do it. It needs a local language speaker. I’ve posted this in the telegram group also.
I think you have missed my point
I am not interested in wasting my time disputing this rule. It does not affect me in any way. If I want to fly to LFBH, I simply go there. No PPR no PN.
I do not use or do I plan to use LFBH as a port of entry or exit outside the Schengen area and if I wish to fly somewhere within the Schengen area I will come and go via LFFK.
For travel outside the Schengen area I will leave and reenter via an airfield with more suitable bse
requirements for the particular flight.
I would not suggest flying directly to LFBH without the 48hr PN whilst this Notam is in force. However, if I suddenly remembered at for eg sake with 30hours to go that I hadn’t sent an email, I might well give the bse a ring and politely explain that I had made an error and the PN time had slipped my mind and is it at all possible to send my PN now.. It might be that the NOTAM is issued as a general cover all because of a shortage of staff at certain times during the said period. It might be that others are arriving or leaving at the same time and it would be no problem to slip you into the schedule. I certainly wouldn’t start saying this stupid PN notam of.yours which goes.against the Schengen.treaty and will kill GA at La.Rochelle.
There would be no point in ringing the airfield as the point of contact is bse.
But this is just a normal French thing to do. It is in our psyche to try to find a solution to do what we want to do.
