Move to Portoroz (Villa on hill)!
AS for Italy… I’ve never tried to fly there myself, but I have a good Italian pilot friend here in the US. His view is that the only kind of personal flying that is viable in Italy is ultralight. It’s probably one of the reasons he decided to make his life in the US.
His view is that the only kind of personal flying that is viable in Italy is ultralight.
Did he give details as to exactly why?
The collapse of certified GA is true for Spain also (see e.g. here) but you need to ask why this is and whether the factors leading to it in these countries are applicable to you.
I have flown to or over Italy countless times and have not seen problems which would be an issue to any pilot. The country is full of lovely destinations and I would like to do a lot more of it.
There is a general reduction in ATC ELP is southern Europe (worse in Spain than Italy, IME) but that would not affect any locals, because they will be speaking the local language anyway. But anyway I have seen a lot fewer issues with ELP in recent years. France remains strangely hard at times, with very strong accents… and American pilots often comment thus when I post my videos on US sites.
Reports from locals suggest that Spanish GA, which was never very healthy anyway (not a lot of money down there generally), collapsed when the EU-funded building boom went bust some 10-15 years ago. Italy is a wealthier country than Spain though, so I am not sure to what extent this can be generalised. But you would be moving down there with adequate funding to carry on with your hobby, so none of this applies.
Perhaps a lack of airports? More likely I’d say a lack of “really really cheap” airports. Italy doesn’t have much 100LL. Perhaps @africaneagle can comment.
I would start with the languages you can speak or learn. Many places like Greece I would not want to live there without good language skills. You can get around with English only for example in Berlin but in many places in the south it will be very difficult.
I think this depends on exactly which “mode” you want to run down there.
If you just rent an apartment and hang out and around for months or years, and have enough stuff to do to not need to get into local communities, you will be fine in Greece just speaking English. This is one of the great things about Greece: unlike certain other “southern” countries where you are shunned (often quite deliberately, to drive home a point) unless you speak their language, the Greeks don’t expect visitors to learn Greek.
But if you want to buy a property and live there properly, that’s going to be a whole different game. I’d say you have no chance unless you speak Greek, or have a Greek colleague to help. The traditional solution, used widely all over the world, is to marry one 
Years ago, we went on a holiday to Kefalonia, and got talking to the Greek couple which owned the apartment. They said they get a lot of Brits coming to live there, only to find it is quite unlike going there as a tourist – not surprisingly. Greek society and officialdom is among the most non-transparent in Europe.
Did he give details as to exactly why?
Here is his answer.
Either things have improved dramatically since 2009-2010 (and we’re
talking about Italy, so it’s laughably unlikely) or this guy is using
a yardstick that’s a foot long. Or he’s rich and flying a
jet/turboprop IFR all the time. All it takes is a cursory google
search to find plenty of horror stories.
I might have told you about that one time we (CFI + myself + 2 other
people) flew down to Rome in a PA-28. We spent the whole day at about
1000 AGL (because ATC wouldn’t authorize anything higher) and making
position reports every 10 minutes (like here when IFR outside radar
coverage, but we were VFR under ‘flight following’ except there’s no
radar coverage to speak of anywhere close to any mountain. And find me
a place in Italy far from the mountains). We needed to get gas and the
only reasonable option was Pisa because there are not that many
airports, and many of those that exist don’t have 100L or were
otherwise closed whenever it was we went. Pisa is a half-military
field and that in Italy involves getting PPR which took a few days to
set up and was valid only for a couple of hours IIRC (here in the US
essentially no mixed use airport requires a PPR). We landed and made
the mistake of using the restrooms while getting gas. Cue 45-60
minutes of talking to the idiot guarding the GA ramp access to
convince him we just used the restrooms and had to go back to the
airplane. The original idiot who let us in had obviously been relieved
in the 5 minutes it took us and didn’t bother briefing his
replacement, and obviously because we’re in Italy he failed to give us
whatever paperwork was required to let us back to the ramp.
This is all anecdotal of course, but the rest of the non-ultralights
GA flights I did were exactly like that if on the shorter side.
Oh, and there are landing fees everywhere, and ramp fees for the
follow-me that allows you to taxi to the place where you can pay your
landing fees. And many airports close because it’s the afternoon, or
it’s getting dark, or today they have no fire fighting services (deal
with it if you’re in the air and want to land there assuming they are
open because they were open last week at the same time), or the guy
giving advisories in a pretend tower is on a coffee break, etc. Oh and
find me the equivalent of a sectional chart + for Italy, if possible
printed, and let me know how it goes.
Essentially the whole thing is set up to be as inconvenient as
possible. Can I call it a collapse of certified GA? No, because for
that to be a thing certified GA must exist first, and in Italy outside
of training and rich guys fucking around in jets there’s never been
any.
Now, ultralight aviation doesn’t solve all of these issues, but it’s
undeniably more flexible. You get to access most GA airports you care
about but can operate elsewhere if you wish, can run on mogas, medical
and currency requirements almost make sense, etc.
- P
Well, that description fits much of Europe, especially southern Europe. Europe is not the US. You do have landing fees and you do have PNR/PPR. And we could all recount funny stories, like me landing at Bastia (Corsica) and taking hours to find somebody who knew what “avgas” was. Same at Salamanca (Spain). I have often reported these things in my trip writeups (because, since I am not making money from any of this, not pumping some Youtube channel to get past 1000 followers to moneytise it, etc, I report both good and bad) and got hammered for it by pilots who are “in love with” some particular country
Flying in Europe does need a bit of planning. You need to check airfield opening hours, etc. Youtube has loads of hilarious videos of American pilots visiting Europe and taking the p1ss out of various things they get stuck into, because they thought it would be just like flying at home. Well, IFR is pretty similar, but you still need to check the airfield, and make sure the route will be in CAS so you get the service you expect (Europe doesn’t have the US’s Class E down to a low level AGL).
I recommend watching some of my videos – those that have the ATC sound track. They were made specifically to show how it works, or doesn’t.
Italy does have a lot of low level Class A which you cannot go into VFR. Anecdotally, according to various Italian pilots, ultralights fly in this routinely, non-transponder. But that isn’t because they legally can. It is just the “UL culture” of “screw the rules” and generally operating below the radar. It’s a culture which exists everywhere. In the UK, too. The main benefit of UL is that the short field capability gives you access to loads of little grass strips, and fairly commonly there is a friendly community (which doesn’t really exist in GA nowadays, otherwise) around it all. See Aart’s post I linked to above.
I did not mention Spain in my earlier post because of Buckerfan’s requirement for a tax-friendly country.
But should that not be a prime consideration, then Spain certainly is an option, and maybe the “less GA-friendly” aspect needs to be considered in more detail:
Let’s divide the airfields here into three categories: 1) State-run (AENA), 2) Privately-run and 3) UL-fields.
There is some overlap between categories 2 and 3. Many of the UL-fields start to allow certified GA to use them. UL’s cannot use cat 1.
Cat 1 is not GA-friendly, although it depends a little on the size of the field. Cat 2 is usually quite GA-friendly. Cat 3 of course very friendly, much like your current base, Buckerfan. But often very basic facilities.
Buckerfan, I think whether the fact that cat 1 is not GA-friendly is a real problem to you depends on your flying profile. Should you travel once a month with the Malibu (Meridian) to go someplace, it’s not really a burden, is it? It would be different if you use her 3 times a week.. But that would maybe be the flying you would do in your “fun plane” which I recall you have? And that aircraft could be stationed on a cat 2 or 3 field..
Some combinations that could work for you:
Cat 1: Girona (LEGE)/ Cat 2: LEAP (Ampuriabrava). Not bad living on the Costa Brava, yet close to the Pyrenees (and on the favorable side of them).
Cat 1: Sabadell (LELL)/Cat 2: Igualada (LEIG). Should you prefer living nearer to Barcelona.
Cat 1: Valencia (LEVC)/Cat 2: Requena (LERE).
There are more combinations further south which I could think of, but you get the idea.
Have you considered becoming a “snowbird”? There are so many of them in Europe. Living up North in summer and down South in winter. Most of them keeping their fiscal residency up North and thus not being down here for more than 6 months. I mean, where you are located now is really fantastic during summer, isn’t it?
You don’t need to own a place over here and just rent, which really saves a lot of hassle. Many property owners actually like having a fixed tenant for the whole year rather than going through the hassle of a hectic rental season in summer only. And so they are willing to accept a reasonable rental price.
The disadvantage would be the logistics for the aircraft, especially the fun plane moving up and down. So maybe leave her up North for summer flying it and do the fun flying down South as part of a club, or buy into a local aircraft?
@johnh I was fortunate to work in Italy a couple of decades ago. The GA community was quite healthy and you could park at Linate for .72 Euro a day, landing fees were equally uninflated, probably a few Euros. On the ramp you might find old 182’s and classic Mooneys, next to Avantis and Lears. Milano Bresso had a nice collection of Marchettis.
Roll forward a few years and Linate is now mandatory handling and for the turbine crowd only, although a pristine Super Cub is still based there.
There are two nice GA opportunities in Italy, in addition to visiting some beautiful parts of Europe: the sea plane rating in Como and the mountain rating in Bolzano/Belluno.
You have a J3 and a Malibu, what type of journey’s do you want to make from where you are based? Back country? Islands? Cities?
I’ve spent some years in the past travelling to visit/stay with an UK ex-pat family who relocated from London to Portugal, first to the Tomar area (they renovated a country house), then eventually to Cascais. Prior to that, I backpacked for a couple of weeks around Portugal in the early 2000s. It’s a considerably underrated country. People are wonderful. Decent amount of infrastructure (roads, especially, but also hospitals and schools) due to EU funding. Food and lifestyle are not terribly sophisticated, but better in places like Lisbon. It can be a little too ex-impoverished and rural. The sun strips in the very south are navigable if you stay away from the worst spots: a bit like southern spain, you just need to place yourself well in the vicinity.
