Should Bournemouth be in the top 10 in the UK?.
In 2005, there were 70,000 non-CAT movements at Bournemouth but that reduced year by year to 38,686 in 2015.
(Total movements including CAT down from 83,000 in 2005 to 45,000 in 2015. This is from the airport website).
It looks as if there were less than 32,000 GA movements in 2016 (excluding military) (from the CAA website).
Is this dramatic reduction reflected at other airfields in the UK or, as locals suspect, is it down to the current management’s actions??
Oxford (not on the list) had 36,000 GA movements in 2016.
My impression when I was at EGHH last summer was that leisure GA had been priced out pretty much and that this was the reason for the reduced activity. The only SEPs and MEPs flying where those from the sausage factory flight schools (whose customers are a bit less proce sensitive), plus maybe a tiny bit of maintenance-related flights. I think one cannot extrapolate from that. Amyway, we know that huge amounts of GA in the UK has, over the last 20 years, shifted from the big airports to the small ones and the strips.
N52886 our Skylane is based at Bend, Oregon a small town in the middle of Oregon (USA). The big airport is 19 miles away at Redmond, Oregon. By commercial standards the Redmond airport is only a few commercial operations per day. Bend has no commercial service. The Bend airport has no tower.
Over 240 aircraft based at the airport
Over 137,000 estimated annual operations
Facilities include a single runway, 5260 feet in length
4 instrument approaches are available.
Corresponding full length dual parallel taxiways
We flew to Wellington, Kansas just this last weekend. On the way back the weather was IFR all directions around the airport, but the airport was just over VFR limits. The controller told us there were 8 airplanes in the pattern as we started our approach. Fun to watch on ADS-B as the airport looked like a bee hive. Our little airport supports glider operations, ultralights, powered parachutes, turboprops, jets as large as the Canadian Challenger. All operating simultaneously. The process operates quite smoothly.
I was in Bend, OR in 2002. Could not see the Lancair factory but talked to several people who were fitting turbines to Lancair IV IIRC. I recently bought a Columbia.
Peter,
I’ve placed the package of brochures that you sent me next to the C-office in Speck-Fehraltorf LSZK (see list posted by Mooney-Driver in post #07). I’ll take a photo next time I go by and post it here.
The airfield had a major addition to the west hangar last year and complete renovation of terrace, restaurant, fuel pumps (Mogas, Avgas, Jet-A1), and apron. Pictures including the opening festivities can be seen under photos on the Facebook page (Speck-Fehraltorf LSZK). It is a grass strip with perfo-plates laid in the turf so it is rarely soft and recovers very quickly after long rainy periods. Note that it’s the only grass strip in the Swiss top-10 for activity.
Vince
And here’s the photo of the brochures in Speck LSZK …
I know, but since others were doing so I thought I’d join in. I pulled a few out of the holder so they’d show up better. They are all from me (i.e. from you). I left them on the counter along with others, and it seems that someone decided they should be organized and set up a holder so they stack.
A quick note on LSZH:
They used to be notorious for their high landing fees. No longer. The new price list is quite a surprise, even though I had to wait to get the first bills to actually understand them. What I see is that ZRH now has all up landing fees (including landing, noise, ATC and so on) of around 30-40 CHF depending if international or local traffic. For training flights it’s below 30 CHF.
Unfortunately they still have handling fees and passenger taxes, but the actual fees are very good news, considering that up to last year an international landing cost up to 100 CHF. Also LSZH now requires flight plans for all flights, the slot id of the flight plan needs to be added to any IFR flight plan too.
(All for 1.2 tons)
MD how’s Dubendorf looking? Is it eventually going to open?
