The obvious choices .. Geneva and Annecy have published notams that you cannot use them for alternate on sat and sun from dec 19 till march somewhere.
That makes flightplanning a lot more unpleasant.
What exactly does this mean?
A pilot can divert to any airport he wants to divert to. The one which you declared as alternate on the flight plan is academic.
They do have “no alternate” airports in the USA too, however. I wonder what that exactly means. I know some airports are military-only and cannot be filed as alternates and IIRC this is the case with some Greek ones.
Commander wrote:
That makes flightplanning a lot more unpleasant.
Why?
Depends on what you need the alternate for.
Geneva and Annemasse are so close that they’ll have roughly the same weather. Granted there might be some weather situation where the Geneva ILS is not good enough for cloud break into Annemasse but good enough for landing in Geneva.
There’s Lausanne LSGL very close by, which is located quite elevated above the lake and presumably less likely to be socked in than Annemasse, and you can get to Annemasse from there in likely less than 2 hours by public transport.
Then there’s Bern LSZB, maybe half an hour away, which provides full service (ILS, customs/immigration, Jet A1 and AVGAS).
Grenchen LSZG is only minutes farther away, and provides offset VOR and RNAV approaches, otherwise also full service.
I wish the alternate situation in Greece was only half as good 
Geneva is PPR and there are close to no slots available in the winter season as the ski charters gobble them all up.
Whether you can go “i’ll divert wherever I want to” that depends – I was once told to go land somewhere else as I missed my slot by 20 minutes and they can’t accomodate me for at least two hours (!), and a couple days ago received the bollocking of all bollockings for being 10 minutes late with regards to sunset cutoff time. This for a based aircraft – so I wouldn’t be necessarily optimistic on how they treat visitors that just “show up”. If it’s an emergency they can’t say no – but weather… (on top of Annemasse and Gva having almost identical weather patterns).
Lausanne would be the most sensible choice as tomjnx said.
I could understand geneva
But why Annecy to?
Annecy and Chambery see a lot of ski charters as well.
Peter wrote:
A pilot can divert to any airport he wants to divert to
He can in an emergency, correct. Other than that, no. Airports which are closed to you as civil private GA have all the right in the world to refuse you, in fact, they do that regularly via PPR and slots. When the slots are used up, no flying. I have stopped counting how many beautiful days I spent thinking it would be great to go flying but could not do so because the slots are taken.
Geneva is such an example. Ever since the regulators decided that the grass runway needed to be taken into the slot account of the concrete runway as well and was not allowed to be operated independently as it used to, Geneva per se is basically gone as a light GA destination. And with the NOTAM in foce, I’d suggest they’d reject any flight plan which lists Geneva as an alternate.
Chambery also has been out as a winter destination for some years, so has Annecy, due to the ski charter traffic. Most of the ski destinations nowadays severely restrict or even ban GA totally during the ski season, see the thread about Austria. In practice, this is the same kind of PPR b.s. as some other places do, in most cases without any necessity than the typical anti GA reflex with which they can get away with during that peak period. For infrastructure such as public airports, this should be forbidden and the operators sued into stopping this malpractice, but apparently nobody is willing to do that.
Sure you cannot do a non-mayday landing at an airport which is PPR / slotted etc.
What puzzles me is why an airport says you cannot file it as an alternate.
Is it done to forcefully drive home the point that since you cannot land there normally, you cannot land there as a diversion either?
Probably to stress the fact that they operate at / beyond capacity and if you divert there you’ll probably be already low on fuel forcing them to give you priority and screwing up their traffic flow. Not to mention GA traffic at non-jet speeds. Weekend traffic in Geneva is a thing to behold.
Peter wrote:
Is it done to forcefully drive home the point that since you cannot land there normally, you cannot land there as a diversion either?
Basically they want to say we are full up and won’t accept any diversions. ZRH does the same during the WEF.
I am not even sure how airports like that with PPR would react if you try to divert there during non-notamed times.
