There is an alternative airfield right next to LFLB and it is called LFLE. You could even use the approach to close to minima into LFLB and then divert to this airfield which sits right next to it. There you don’t pay any landing fee, no handling, no parking. The only drawback is that if it is snowing in the valley over Chambery, they will not clear the runway instantly, but it works great if the weather is clear. I just used it last weekend and you are welcomed there by the local pilot community. Before that I would fly to LFLB or Albertville. There is a simple hotel right opposite the street of LFLE as well and a good pizza restaurant next to it. So basically, we flew out of LFLE into Courchevel to ski which is a 10 minute flight.
Cirrus parked at LFLE
Fleecing skiers is the world’s second oldest profession, and there is nothing better than fleecing skiers arriving in bizjets 
The airports are awfully posh though. For your 1k, you get nice coffee, fresh croissants, nice seafood salads, a nice waitress who speaks English… whereas at a 10 quid airport you get
while at a €10 airport you might get something similar and won’t get served until after all the local language speakers have got served 
Even well below the Chambery level you get great service at say Bolzano… Not a lot of GA goes there, either.
It’s just gouging, and some people obviously pay it.
Traffic management? Saturday might be their busiest day of the week during the ski season, but I doubt they have more than a movement every 20-30 minutes. It’s hardly CDG.
If reasonable costs can be established for other days I might give it a go. Or go during the summer for a walking holiday.
There is a working winter slot system at Chambery, so the argument about discouraging people from landing on busy Saturdays doesn’t sound convincing to me. It’s more about taking advantage of the bizjet clients. They won’t notice an extra thousand euros when an hour of flight costs them 10k. They also just paid several times higher landing fee at Vnukovo, so it is relatively cheap at Chambery.
I would guess that Chambery see it as a way ofbgetting rich people (or the people they perceive to have lots of money) to provide enough income to keep the airport running and the fees reasonable on every other day of the year.
Emir wrote:
This is very poor excuse. Moreover, if you read loco’s post above, he wasn’t flying SEP and he didn’t need parking. So as I wrote, it’s a ripoff.
Firstly I have no insider knowledge or allegiance to Chambery airport… I’m just musing here.
Confused about your comment though. Loco appears to have been charged a large surcharge for landing on a Saturday. I don’t think this is a parking charge… it’s a charge for a Saturday movement. I’m assuming it’s designed to discourage people from landing on the busy Saturdays, thus encouraging them to plan their trips so that they land on other days.
If it was an attempt to ‘rip off’ people then I would have thought it would apply on every day, and all year round, and not just during the busiest day of the winter.
Ibra wrote:
You are probably talking from UK ATCO point of view? if you add doing “coordination for an airway join” and “provide IFR/VFR separation in Delta” it would sound even better
Ha… yes I think my analogy got rather lost in translation. Of course all the French altiports are strictly VFR… it would be obviously bonkers for somewhere like Courchevel or Megeve to have an instrument approach :-) The comparison was simply that these airports are similar to Chambery in that there is one way in and one way out, due to the massive whacking-great mountains at the end of the respective runways.
When planning for Saturday movements I’m guessing that the tower at Chambery have to assume that if conditions are IFR, then given it’s basically a procedural approach, any aircraft landing or taking off will be ‘blocking’ the final approach path, and so numbers are limited. Thus the high fee which is only in place on Saturday’s… the busiest day I would presume.
(And just to be clear, I wouldn’t dream of landing IFR in Chambery in my plane… but there are lots of commercial operators and airlines who can and do).
I seem to remember Annecy also had a weekend surcharge… for much the same reasons.
On Saturdays they have a lot of flights and (at least used to) have transport jets etc carrying many thousands of passengers so presumably would want to prioritise these over SEP traffic.
This is very poor excuse. Moreover, if you read loco’s post above, he wasn’t flying SEP and he didn’t need parking. So as I wrote, it’s a ripoff.
I did not have that possibiliy in mind but yes possible
Ibra wrote:
there is no way to sequence IFR traffic in controlled towers without Radar+ILS where minimum vectoring matches platform altitude…so all the time you will be stuck with one single IFR traffic blocking all the way from IAF to Hold? or from RWY to SID?
Why not if the missed approach is procedurally separated from the initial/intermediate/final approach?
