If I were in charge, any airport that gets controlled airspace would be compelled to offer a minimum number of say 12 “no frills, self handling” parking spaces with maximum fee of no more than £15 per tonne per day, with enforcement with teeth if they try to pull tricks to make these spaces unavailable (e.g. claiming it’s full when it’s empty, or letting hangar queens accidentally park there permanently and “fill it up”). After all, they are taking a large swathe of public airspace for their own use, so the quid pro quo is that they also must give something back to the community they are taking the airspace away from. If they want to keep their eyewatering fees for a C150, they have to do without CAS.
@alioth, it’s not just that, right? If they were charging, say, £200 per movement of a very small plane, then OK, I understand – it would be on par with other “regional airports”. Or if they had such a busy runway, that there was no way to squeeze in more traffic, I could understand that as well, or maybe if it was a London City airport (which is actually cheaper!). But for the airport in the middle of nowhere, with traffic less than Biggin (and these days biz jets landing at Biggin aren’t smaller or flying less frequently), I don’t see business logic.
You see, they’ve created a reputation for themselves of “don’t touch it with a barge pole”. If you’re asked by a person that needs a business airport to fly to London, would you recommend Farnborough? Probably not.
I’ve been asked twice by people flying expensive planes as passengers, and my answer re: Farnborough wasn’t “no”, but “f$ck NO!”. If you don’t NEED to be in that area west of London, you just don’t go there. And in both cases people went other places (one was Biggin, the other – Southend).
So again, aviation world is a small one and if you behave like like w&%ker, you will be treated as such. And Farnborough is behaving just like that.
boscomantico wrote:
We are always interested. Which airline airports in Spain do you fly to which are thus?
LEAS Asturias and LESA Santander for instance are not anywhere costly. It’s 9 € landing fee, handling flat thanks to AOPA Spain and parking is paid per minute 
Less than 50 for full IFR approach stuff and staff, parking overnight and handling is doable I think. (So bad I still don’t have my IR, because LESA is IFR only during the week and I can only fly on weekends) Don’t know if immigration is available there, but hey it should be, there’s check-in like in any big airport.
By the way there’s a list in the Spanish AIP where the fees are announced. The 9 € landing fee and flat handling for GA is available in several airports, not all, but many.
And then both destinations are really beautiful. (So bad we always have to go to visit family )
Well one downside is quite high AVGAS prices, where an additional handling charge may even be added.
By the way, LESA is quite interesting. There’s military on the airfield, doing landing training and low fly-overs from any direction. There’s the fleet of fire fighters, quite impressive. And lots of TB10s and TB20s and small twins of a flight school, but am not sure if they’re flown any more (at least the TB10s were very active the other day). And the instrument approaches are at least unusual
Found two snapshots from LESA
Salamanca is ok, but it took a while to get fuel because everybody pretended to not speak English and not even understand alpha victor golf alpha sierra 
Quite comical really. ATC absolutely refused to help, saying it is not their job. In the end I found some American students in a FTO there. The city is nice.
Alioth I have always had the view that for Controlled Airspace the airport that requires this should be charged on the VOLUME of CAS controlled. I bet there would be some huge shrinkages if applied.
Peter wrote:
Europe does not have a “national transport infrastructure” policy for this.
I think that’s they key sentence here, because to really reverse the trend, that is exactly what it would take.
I know this is probably not a majority view on here, but more power to the EU could actually significantly improve our hobby if done right. Admittedly, the opposite is also true.
Peter wrote:
because everybody pretended to not speak English
Google translate is your friend
I know this is probably not a majority view on here, but more power to the EU could actually significantly improve our hobby if done right. Admittedly, the opposite is also true.
This is difficult.
On the one hand, we are seeing Brussels creating an ever tighter club, based around EU and particularly Schengen “borders”. Of course many favour this as a correct ideology, but the reality is that it makes life difficult for those “outside”. This is probably deliberate – a completely normal human nature. As I wrote before, a model plane flying club will try to ban non-members from flying on its favourite public hillside, so channelling more membership money to the club. I don’t think the “French problem” (so many airports going on a 24hr/48hr PN) is primarily brexit-revenge driven (because it started > 10 years ago) and is instead rooted in weird police politics, but I am certain there is an element of that, especially noting Macron’s positioning as the self-appointed UK-beating stick-carrier But of course those within the Schengen border will say “what the hell; we are allright”. I write this as (originally Czech) living in the UK so my view is different, and looking at it practically the UK is one of Europe’s two biggest (by a huge margin; France has more pilots but with only 5% having ELP… so Germany is the other) international GA travelling communities, so whatever restricts UK pilots’ international travel is bad for funding GA infrastructure in Europe generally. If I was in the airport business I would totally welcome “non club members”, especially if they have few other places to go to, and food at home is crap but I reckon these policies are determined at a higher political level. For example it is clear that Le Touquet has brilliant political connections in the Paris elite; the usual joke about Macron having a house there is probably not wrong!
On the other hand, trying to achieve something by making the EU stronger is difficult. Airspace structure doesn’t really impact travelling ability (unless ridiculous like UK’s and Italy’s Class A) and anyway there has been a wholesale capitulation on harmonising this (due to virtually intractable national/nationalist airspace sovereignity attitudes, confirmed to me by Eric Sivel; a former EASA chief, years ago). The EU also can’t dictate airport pricing, other than by regulating high-visibility anticompetitive practices, but a) these have to be above its radar and b) it’s hard to do in a free (EU!) country. There was a guy here who raised about 6k to pay for a legal firm study of this issue, they reported the EU should look into it, but that’s as far as it got. Well, the action also got “anti support” from another UK pilot group who thought that dragging this out might cause “airline” airports (which are the main culprits in this) to ban GA altogether… And there is a lot of resistance among most member countries to making the EU even stronger. So the EU focuses its regulation on popular/achievable low hanging fruit like consumer rights (what is not to like), banning lead (and 200 other substances) from electronics (what is not to like, even if 99.99% of people have never heard of 199 of them) but regulating the business models of private companies would be impossible. As von Bismarck said, and echoed by a Brussells guy on TV when asked about bullfighting, politics is the art of the possible. It can certainly regulate State funding of airports but that doesn’t help us.
So I have no idea what can be done. I think we are basically screwed, gradually, in the long term, and as with all flying one has to focus on doing it so it continues to deliver a good ratio of value to hassle. And our kids, if they fly GA, will be flying a lot more in the “below radar grass strip scene”, which, no surprise, is what they already do in Spain and Italy where “normal” GA is so difficult that only a masochist bothers to do it.
Peter wrote:
Europe does not have a “national transport infrastructure” policy for this.
E X A C T L Y.
alioth wrote:
If I were in charge, any airport that gets controlled airspace would be compelled to offer a minimum number of say 12 “no frills, self handling” parking spaces with maximum fee of no more than £15 per tonne per day, with enforcement with teeth if they try to pull tricks to make these spaces unavailable (e.g. claiming it’s full when it’s empty, or letting hangar queens accidentally park there permanently and “fill it up”).
It could be much easier than that.
The EU should include a precondition to any airport or aerodrome license, which declares them as public infrastructure and force them to keep a sub 2 ton class for landing and parking fees, together with a possibility of basic no frills handling, the charge of which may not be higher than:
-€ 50 for landing AND handling up to 2 metric tons and another 50 per ton thereafter up to 5.7. tons. For flights which require neither customs nor immigration, the maximum fee should be reduced to €30.
-€ 5 per metric ton per day for parking.
They also should be forced to maintain a parking space for at least 20 sub 2 ton airplanes, of which 10 need to be available for non-based airplanes.
PPR and PNR needs approval by the CAA and is only given in exceptional cases with reasoning. Airport slot requirements by airport need to be justified by the relevant airport by proving that runway capacity exceeds the actual demand, this being determined over several periods during the day.
Large international hubs may be exempt from the requirement to accomodate small GA only if:
- A fully equipped (IFR/Night/AOE) airfield designed for GA use is available within 25 NM or with transport infrastructure, which allows reaching the center of the area served in no more than the time required from the main airport.
- They need to be charged a fee for the exemption, the monies of which are used to keep the alternate airfields working.
This would let some of the main airports off the hook if they can provide a reasonable alternate, but would put a stop to outpricing on most airports which have no such alternatives.
