PA28 looking for Hangarage , 1.5h driving from North London max

I live in north London and happily hangared my TB20 at Wycombe Air Park for a few years and I think they have some space in their hangars at present. They have a very professional well-run operation there (because they train ab-initio commercial pilots) with full ATC and excellent maintenance facilities for Pipers and Cessnas.

Wycombe was an hour by car from where I live, and after waiting a long while for a hangar spot at Elstree, I got one six months ago and moved my plane there. Because of its location Elstree is very popular and very busy. Its facilities however are not as good as those at Wycombe: the runway is sloping and cracked, and they have a FISO not full ATC despite being so busy (like a beehive on occasion) but it’s much closer to my home which means I fly much more and the people are friendly which is nice. I don’t know if they have any hangar space at the moment. They used to operate a waiting list I believe.

Neither Wycombe nor Elstree have any instrument approaches, precision or otherwise. There was talk of Wycombe getting a GNSS approach a few years back, but I have heard no more of it recently. It would be very helpful if Elstree applied for such a thing but I can’t see a commercial reason for them doing so. In the meantime, me and others based at Elstree and Wycombe have to use the airports mentioned above that do have approaches, as diversion airfields if poor weather descends.

I didn’t say it is completely general. I said “often” and “most”

I have experienced this enough times in GA, and it isn’t just in hangarage. Try emailing farm strip owners and ask if they have a space for you to be based there.

The GA scene has a lot of people in it who like to run their places in certain ways and they maintain allegiances to various colleagues and businesses…

Also, in the UK, most people with a hangar get more propositions than a 29 year old female profile on a dating site, slim, looking for a casual relationship

As is so often the case in life, property/land owners run the show.

This is a subject close to my heart because where I am nobody is allowed to do any work in any of the hangars, and that is not unusual.

That wasn’t my experience at all at Fairoaks (which doesn’t fit the OP’s request, but shows that what Peter experienced shouldn’t be generalised fully).

Note that hangarage is often a bit like foreign travel privileges for trusted communist party members in the Soviet Bloc

It’s no good posting online asking about this, except in general terms.

At most airfields, the ground scene is quite political (basically because most people are struggling to make money) so hangarage is tied to bringing a “nice plane” to a maintenance company to “look after” it. Where I was hangared for 10+ years I had such an arrangement and I was the only person in all that time to be allocated a hangar space there. That hangar has since disappeared…

So you need to visit these places in person and make enquiries with different companies face to face. Forget even email.

toga67 wrote:

Not necessarily with precision approaches.

Welcome to England. Even if you say non-precision approaches, the list is the same.

If you without approaches you have many more choices. Booker, Turweston amongst others.

Southend? Easy from east london, and has train directly into airport

AIUI there’s a lot of very pissed off people at Cranfield right now.
Some businesses have just discovered that their lease did not include any agreed provision of access to a working airport……….

Some ATC crisis, reduced opening hours, ad hoc closures, full PPR. Airport mismanagement gone crazy.