or Florida. Lot’s of Canadian snowbirds 
That’s true for much of the US too, especially the mid-West. It’s all a question of one’s tolerances and point of reference. Alberta is actually not that bad. There are often chinooks in the winter, Calgary and south, that can make the winters quite tolerable … certainly better than 500km to the east:
And lots of fantastic skiing, incl heli-skiing, nearby.
I’d have more of a warm fuzzy with the administration/bureacracy in Canada/US than Mexico.
I stumbled upon this short discussion on putting in your own strip.
Granted it is in freedom units, but interesting nonetheless. I particularly liked on asking neighbours about putting in his airstrip “it’s your land, why are you asking us”
https://straightlevel.libsyn.com/website/tech-talk-building-your-own-grass-runway
Off_Field wrote:
I particularly liked on asking neighbours about putting in his airstrip “it’s your land, why are you asking us”
Presumably that is not anywhere in Europe. NIMBYs rule in Europe..
The very LAST thing I would do if I wanted to operate a strip in Europe is mention it to any neighbours.
The trick is to operate so they dont know the strip is there.
Regards, SD..
No it’s the states.
I agree in Europe being quiet is the best strategy, unless you happen to know your neighbours well.
It was interesting to hear that for one of the chaps the strip was covered under agricultural zoning. as well as how useful the recreational use statute is for their liabilities.
Posts moved to an existing thread.
Within Europe, the rules vary widely. The UK has the 28 day rule which can “sort of work” but limits the utility value severely, unless you can go beyond the limit, which is possible only in some situations. Another related discussion is on air parks. I believe @jude098 did a lot of work on that.
As is often the case on EuroGA, the thread is rather UK centric.
I tried to google any precedents for private airfields in Germany.
One newspaper article here (in German) describes how a leading manager at Berlin-Schönefeld airport wanted to use a 370×60 m area at his private home in the rural Spreewald area as private airstrip for his PA-18.
The article describes how more than 50 different government departments had to give their approval. That did not seem to have been the main hurdle, however, rather a few NIMBYs in the neighbourhood and environmental activists who were worried about disturbance of a nearby eagle’s nest by the airfield (actually abandoned for years…) caused a delay in the approval procedure, and the mayor of the town was hostile to the idea…
Another article here (also in German) describes “Germany’s only farmer with a private airfield” in Schleswig-Holstein. Interesting data points are that the 306m grass runway cost him 9000 Euro and that the official survey of the ground demonstrated that the runway could carry aircraft of the size and weight of a C160 Transall…
In this article it is noted that the local community (council in UK parlance), the environmental office and the Luftaufsicht had to give their approval (and did…).
Would the german chaps field also require the flugleiter in a shed somewhere? I understood that that was another significant problem in Germany for private sites.
I think that in france for microlights you are pretty free to do as you like. Certified I think needs more approvals.
Yeah well, the article with the farmer’s airfield mentions that the farmer’s son has to be on the field with a fire extinguisher due to fire safety laws whenever the father is flying…
A Flugleiter with a radio, in the stricter sense, is actually not mandatory, but someone to provide first aid / firefighting capability is…
As is often the case on EuroGA, the thread is rather UK centric.
There is a simple way to correct that
Actually I recall other examples posted around the forum over the years, but they were spread around. A lot of the issues popped up in the airpark threads, because it is basically the same problem.
In a lot of places it is a matter of who you know / how much influence you have locally. Old established wealthy families (dynasties) exist all over Europe, even in what most would call “socialist” countries, and they seem to get a lot more done.
Is there really no way around the flugleiter requirement? I recall posts stating that there is a way to avoid it.
I can offer my German airfield as data point.
A few years ago, due to changes in the land lease agreement, we had to move the runway quite substantially. It went from South of a row of hangars to North of them.
The administrative processes wasn’t much short of setting up a completely new airfield.
Two things I can recall off the top of my head are the requirement to announce the change publicly so anyone affected has the chance to object within a certain amount of days (90, IIRC). No one did, in our case, but this phase makes you vulnerable to NIMBYs, environmentalists and grumpy people in general.
The next issue was a kind of “noise certificate” for the airfield. Again, this was an easy one for us, because it was easily proven that our noise level is totally insignificant compared to the Naval Air Station across the fence.
In a different location, this could be prohibitively expensive.
Regarding the Flugleiter issue:
We took the opportunity to include Operations without Flugleiter into the airfield approval.
It has to be stated in this document, and because most German airfields were set up when the idea was even more unthinkable than it is now, many simply never added it. But they could.
We now have the option that home-based pilots may take off and land without a Flugleiter, but only with someone standing by with a fire extinguisher and a phone should they crash and burn. Most of the time someone is accompanying a pilot anyway to watch them depart, so that’s enough.
The pilot also has to make sure their flight is entered into the airfield log, as this is something a Flugleiter has to do.
No circuit flying or flying training is allowed under this provision. At least it’s a start.
Let’s see where we can get from there.
