Many questions arise when you plan to fly somewhere.
Most of the answers are in the AIP and other official publications.
Below the generic list of questions the answers of which are usually not easy to find.
I added the answers for Antwerp, as I know the place, and my specific questions about Santander, a place I plan to fly to this summer.
I dream of a database where I could find the answer to these questions
Q1: Is the aerodrome PPR? The answer should be in the AIP, I always ask myself wether I should call to get some valuable information (even if it’s not PPR).
Should I rather fax or Email? Will a radio call on arrival suffice to get the PPR?
Would it be wise to keep a written confirmation that the permission was granted to show to suspicious personnel on arrival? What is the best way to get an answer? Email, fax, and to whom?
Antwerp is not PPR, you don’t have to call anyone in advance, anyway I can’t imagine that anyone could give you any trick or any valuable piece of information.
Santander is PPR, what is the best way to get an answer? Email, fax? Should I send my request to someone in particular?
Q2: Is a handling agent mandatory?
The answer should be in the AIP, but:
In some places, such as Antwerp, AIP says that it’s mandatory to have a handling agent. If you request handling via Email, you won’t get an answer. But you will save a lot of time (and some money) if you don’t request any handling at Antwerp. Just request “General Aviation Apron” once landed.
I can imagine that in some other places, a handling agent, although not mandatory, will save you a lot of time and hassle for a worthwhile cost. Is Santander such a place?
Q3: Where to park, how do I go airside?
Is it easy to reach the airside? Should I request a specific apron ? Are there any tricks? Are there cables so that you can tie down your aircraft? Hangarage? Is it only a grass apron? Is it allowed to walk or will a bus come to pick you up, meaning that you have to rush to pack your things, and should not forget anything in the plane you might need later.
In Antwerp, request “General Aviation Apron” once landed. There is no way to tie down your aircraft. You should wear a high visibility jacket, and walk to the arrivals. If coming from out of Schengen Area, it’s on the left. You can request hangarage on the north side of the airfield, it’s no easy access and should be arranged in advance with Stylaviation
What about Santander?
Q4 Landing fees?
Should I pay my landing fee on arrival or can it wait until departure? Is it easy to pay or should I plan to wait?
In Antwerp, you must pay your landing fee within 24h of landing. Once airside, walk towards the restaurant and you’ll see the C sign. They will probably tell you that it’s okay to pay on departure, but take a note of the name of the person who tells you that. The desk is manned all the time, so you generally won’t wait.
In Antwerp, you have to go to the desk on departure, as you must announce your departure even if you filed a FPL. You will then pay the passenger fee, the parking fee, and maybe a take off fee.
What about Santander?
Q5: How do I get back to my plane?
Some places are completely open, others are completely fenced, some are fenced, but there is a never locked door somewhere, or a code to dial everybody knows, but you. In some places, you have to go through the general security, meaning that you may not have a bottle of water nor a swiss knife with you.
At Antwerp, you go through the general security, you show your licence (Remember never to leave your aircraft without your licence), and you’re allowed to have your bottle of water or your swiss knife. They might ask you to wait until airline flights passengers are through, so that you don’t mix with them. Then walk to your plane with you yellow or orange outfit.
What about Santander?
Q6: Fuel?
Do they have AVGAS, is it a truck or should I taxi to the fuel station? How do I pay? Is it manned all the time? Should I plan to wait for hours?
In some places you must pay cash, others only accept fuel cards, and sometimes you must show a tax number. In some places they don’t have change.
Antwerp has AVGAS. You must taxi to the fuel station, they don’t accept BP card although it’s a BP station, you have to find the guy as the self-service station won’t accept any other card than a local one. The guy’s phone number is on the AIP, call him before you taxi, he might be having his lunch or refuelling a big jet with the truck. Cash is probably accepted, credit cards are accepted.
What about Santander? Fuel/credit Cards accepted? Do they need a tax number? etc?
Q7 facilites?
Is there a place where I can file a flight plan, get weather, and find a bathroom? Or get an internet access?
At Antwerp there is no easy internet access I know of, the bathroom is easy to access once outside, and there is a briefing room upstairs.
Q8 Language
Do the ground personnel speak English?
In Antwerp they do speak English, but sometimes are not willing to, in particular if they suspect you live in Belgium, as they want you to speak Dutch in that case. Say you live abroad and it’s your first visit.
Q9 Miscellaneous
Antwerp is easy to commute to Brussels, Bus to Berchem station (10 mn) then train to Brussels (40mn). Reasonably good restaurant at the airport, a nice terrace with a view but as it’s raining all the time there I never had the opportunity to enjoy it.
Hmmm,
I’ll answer a handful of your questions… 
Santander, a place I plan to fly to this summer.
I dream of a database where I could find the answer to these questions
Q1: Is the aerodrome PPR?
No.
The answer should be in the AIP
Indeed
I always ask myself wether I should call to get some valuable information (even if it’s not PPR)
Unless you really have a reason to inquire, no. It’s a rather bad habit, since it makes these people get used to it. Other airports get upset if you call to ask for pieces of information that are published.
Should I rather fax or Email?
Totally depends.
Five to ten years ago, fax was still the name of the game, generally.
Nowadays, things have changed quite a bit and most airports will reply to emails (if you send it to the right address, that is). If you email to a handling agent, you will 95% get a reply; if you email to “airport ops”, the reply rate is lower.
Will a radio call on arrival suffice to get the PPR?
Absolutely no. There is a handful of UK airports where this works but otherwise nowhere else in Europe.
Would it be wise to keep a written confirmation that the permission was granted to show to suspicious personnel on arrival?
Yess.
What is the best way to get an answer? Email, fax, and to whom?
Not possible to give one right answer. Depends.
Antwerp is not PPR, you don’t have to call anyone in advance, anyway I can’t imagine that anyone could give you any trick or any valuable piece of information.
Sure, you can call OPS.
Santander is PPR
For all I can see (AIP + current NOTAMs) it’s not.
what is the best way to get an answer? Email, fax? Should I send my request to someone in particular?
Check the AIP and see what’s there under “Airport Ops”, try email ([email protected]). If that doesn’t work, try fax. If that doesn’t work, call.
Otherwise, don’t do anything. It doesn’t look like they’re PPR.
On a more general note, you really don’t want to get an answer to all of the other questions you posted, before each flight. If you know every single detail about the airport in advance, it’s going to be zero things to discover, and no real “experience”. Sure, be aware of opening hours, fuel availability and have a rough idea about the fees. But let some of the other details happen as they come. It’s not a mathematics degree.
On a more general note, you really don’t want to get an answer to all of the other questions you posted, before each flight. If you know every single detail about the airport in advance, it’s going to be zero things to discover, and no real “experience”. Sure, be aware of opening hours, fuel availability and have a rough idea about the fees. But let some of the other details happen as they come. It’s not a mathematics degree.
I acknowledge there are pilots who are happy to fly somewhere and come across unexpected stuff, but I think the view on how much to “discover” is variable 
Personally I like to check stuff out before flying there. I do have a day job and my longer trips are fitted into that. Also most places I fly to are places I want to actually get to and not divert somewhere because they have refused me a landing clearance because I didn’t give them prior notice. Most alternates are places where I absolutely do not want to be at all and they are filed and planned only to save my life (a landing is not optional, etc).
The issue of due diligence before flying somewhere gets progressively bigger as you go more south in Europe, because the more south you go the more disorganised (and even corrupt) the place gets. In Germany or Switzerland, reading the AIP should suffice. In Greece, the AIP is full of crap (a legacy of it being available only in a chargeable paper publication till recently) and nobody takes it seriously, and e.g. airport opening hours are found (accurately) in the notams! Spain? “Spain is Spain” is what old-timers down there tell me And “Italy is Italy” and IME is considerably less “transparent” than Spain unless you speak Italian in which case everything changes
So I prefer to do a bit of research before flying somewhere. If anything, you might get stuff like “we have no avgas right now” which is priceless info unless you happen to have enough left to get out of there to the intended next landing.
A while ago I started writing up some notes on this stuff, here.
I am off to Salamanca and Santander later this week. In the AIP, and see here, neither needs any form of prior notice (for IFR, anyway, in Salamanca’s case) although a phone call made in Spanish by a friend to Salamanca revealed that they have unspecified issues with their military neighbours and they would like an email with the full details of everybody, a day or more in advance. It also pays to avoid needing Customs there, apparently…
The issue of email versus fax is a tricky one. So many published email addresses are duff, the email gets dumped by an antispam system, or nobody reads it. Whereas if you send a fax and it gets sent OK, it is highly likely it got to a real fax machine. Of course you can’t tell if anybody read it. I normally send both email and fax at the same time, and always put my email address in the fax. The response is usually by email, which is OK because you then have the right address. On most longer trips to the south, I shoot off emails and faxes to all airports in question, maybe a week before going. The situation is improving and email works a lot better now than 10 years ago, which is just as well since fax is used rarely.
Certainly, a handling agent is far more likely to reply than the airport admin office, because the handler is a standalone business. But you don’t necessarily want to end up paying for handling. It can range from say €20 (trivial) to €500 (not trivial). Handling is the default mode of flying for most of aviation history and in the bizjet world it is standard to use it, but light GA normally tries to avoid it. I know just one pilot (a piston twin) who used to willingly pay for it.
Unless you really have a reason to inquire, no. It’s a rather bad habit, since it makes these people get used to it.
That’s an interesting perspective which I disagree with, because many airports in Europe are run by people who are not really interested in operating an airport. They just want to turn up for work (if they really have to) and get paid. Aeroplanes are not a desirable activity, and this gets worse the more south you go.
On most longer trips to the south, I shoot off emails and faxes to all airports in question, maybe a week before going.
I hope they never get hold of a Buk missile system…
Does a IFR flight plan count as PPR.?
A flight plan never counts as PNR/PPR, anywhere.
@boscomantico
I have checked the AIP before posting and, as I wrote above, sometimes, AIP and practice are different, that’s why I ask my questions here.
According to AIP GEN 1.2.5. 3.1 Santander is one of the Aeropuertos con Horarios Facilitados
According to AIP GEN 1.2.5. 3.3
At Schedules Facilitated airports, the procedure for general aviation, business, airtaxi, test and training flights will be as follows:
- The flight operator will request authorization directly from the Operations Centre of each airport a minimum of three hours before the scheduled arrival time (ETA) and/or the scheduled takeoff time (ETD), providing the following information:
- flight date and time. – flight identification (flight number and registration mark). – type of aircraft . – origin airport and arrival time. – destination airport and departure time.
So it seems that there is a discrepancy between theory and practice.
Just checked that. It is weird to have these things written in part GEN. Also, they should at least replicate that in part AD.
They even have places like Sabadell in that list of airports. Laughable, it’s a VFR, GA only airfield!
I wonder how hold that AIP entry in part GEN is. As a matter of fact, tons of people (me included) have used these airports without any form of PPR (and without being bothered after landing).
From GEN 1.2:
bq. Based on the level of congestion at the airport, the Operations Centre will decide whether or not to authorize the requested operation schedule. At busy times they may offer alternative schedules.
Laughable. Typical for Spain.
This kind of ambiguity, which is best resolved by getting a local language speaker to phone up the airport and even then the information isn’t going to be in writing so you can’t rely on it in “strict PPR” cases, is why the minimal effort involved in shooting off a few emails (plus faxes, for good measure, if you have an email2fax facility) might just be helpful, even if you never know whether it was or wasn’t.
Most of the time you won’t get a reply but just sometimes you will get something back which forces a change of plan, and that is a “useful” outcome in itself.
Other sources tell me Santander is not PNR or PPR.
I have had PPR arranged with Zaragoza, by phone from Granada, which Zaragoza washed their hands of aggressively (they issued a Cancel message to Eurocontrol to cancel my flight plan there). And while this has never happened to me, I know of a group of pilots who were denied a landing clearance at Corfu because again they did the PPR only verbally and the same officer was not on duty when they turned up, so they had to divert to Dubrovnik. These airports did that just for a laugh – to show they can. I have been turned away on final approach from Padova in Italy, who denied received any of four faxes for PNR Customs (inbound from Croatia). For the sake of making a positive contact, why not just send the message? In some “known problem” cases like Corfu (which is alone in Greece in this behaviour) I keep re-sending it until I get a reply Disclaimer: I speak only English, which makes a huge difference in Spain and Italy.
I’ve been VFR several times to LEXJ and I’ve never asked for a slot and never got a complaint for that.
It’s true that the last time was like one year ago, maybe, so things may have changed.
In any case the only mention to PPR in the AD part is this one:
Touch and go operations by training, school and private flights have to request
clearance from operatons office, with a minimum of two business
days.
Fax: +34-942 202 153 / 52
AFTN: LEXJZPZX
For me it means that only touch and go operations, made by training, school or private flights, need to be authorized previously.
But maybe somebody in the airport management reads (or he intented to have written) that t&g and school, and private flights need the authorization…
