I have always found Biggin to be very heplful, it has been my preferred option for some time, with helpful staff, a very nice passenger lounge with refreshments avalable and free car park with 24 hour security it is a much better option than Shoreham for picking up a passenger who lives in the Gatwick area.
The price differential between Shoreham and Biggin is soon negated by the charge at Shoreham for what is effectively on street car parking in an unattended field. Add to that the superb service at Biggin ( I walk in to pay for the landing and get a weather and notam information pack of the same quality that I get when flying an airliner ) and the availability of a precision approach should I need it. All in all for me Biggin ticks all the boxes if you are using the aircraft for serious travel, Shoreham is OK if you are just visiting the area but it is just not in the same class as Biggin.
I fly to Biggin relatively regularly nowadays (there is a hangar there, available for servicing and diversions) and there is some training activity going on, but a lot less than the (reportedly) hugely busy scene back in the 1970s and 1980s. I don’t know the reason why it died, but it won’t be the very recent security issues (the chief one which is all over the UK aviation chat sites is that the new management is asking for the CRB check (normally used for jobs with children etc to try to weed out perverts) before issuing the code to the gates to get airside). It may be the landing fee (20 quid – I can’t remember?) which, multiplied by the number of landings during a PPL, makes a PPL cost quite a bit more than at some other places like Redhill.
I don’t think there is any publicly open catering at Biggin, or at least we have never found any. Years ago there used to be quite a big cafe but it is long gone. The best option is Tesco in the village 
Biggin is perhaps the best diversion for Shoreham because you can get a taxi back for £70, which is far less than Lydd (£150 last time anybody I know did it) or Bournemouth (2 trains and loads of messing about).
Is there any catering at Biggin now? Last time I went there was a few years ago, and while I don’t begrudge the landing fee, there was no catering. I assumed you would need to arrive in a bizjet to be afforded access to a presumably private lounge where food might be on offer. Otherwise a great airport, though I wish they would allow practise ILS approaches to non-residents.
Fully agree. For visitors it has always been very nice and still is.
OTOH, it seems that the local (once vibrant) flying school / club scene has completely gone down the drain in the last 6-8 years though. Based aircraft owners complain about insane security faff…
Yes I quite liked Biggin when I went there. I think its reputation is often a little unfair. For its traffic level it offers pretty good service.
Jet-A1 in the UK is very cheap.
We went to Biggin Hill EGKB yesterday evening to spent the night in London City.
We were quite surprised with how friendly the ground staff was!
There was no ATM at the airport, and we needed some GBP for the public transport. No issue at all as the staff borrowed us some money :)
The man from the fuel truck did not put any VAT on the JET-1, so filling up was ridiculously cheap (something like 0,70£ / L).
This morning they asked if we have Hi-Vis vests. I told them we had them, but in the aircraft. No problem at all; we got some nice “Biggin Hill London” vests for free.
All in all a very good experience. Landing + parking fee was OK too (around 40£, which I think is OK for an instrument airport and good opening hours).
Getting into London City takes about 1 hr. First bus line 320 to Bromley South. And then the train to Victoria.
Hmm, called Biggin Hill earlier today to book an ILS approach and I made the mistake of mentioning the words ‘practise approach’. I was told that practise approaches are only allowed if you are based at Biggin, and not if you are based elsewhere. Oh well, I spent some time earlier in the week on MS flight sim anyhow practising the arrival procedure, the DME arc and the intercept, and a few missed approaches, so that will do me
I recall that thread… in fact the last post on it is mine
There are many reasons why the UK is like this, and most of them come down to who pays for what and who recovers the cost of what from who.
Hence it rapidly gets very political, with predictable responses (some pretty vile responses, on an effectively unmoderated forum) which do not help to illuminate the issues.
One common thread in these debates is that ATC people quickly get very defensive – understandably so as their jobs are funded by the system.
Then you get GA whose various factions often don’t get on but they do share at least one objective: maximum Class G. Correctly so IMHO, but you can’t have loads of Class G and loads of CAS
CAS is also expensive because each piece of it needs a controller, and with no funding from most of GA traffic… ?
Throw in the way NATS (London Control etc) is funded, throw in the IMC Rating (whose holders “are not proper IFR pilots and cannot be allowed into proper CAS”), throw in the lack of route charges for VFR < 5700kg and IFR < 2000kg, and you get what we have…
Yes the regulars know how to play the system, including filing routes to/from the UK as a string of DCTs, sometimes with 9.9nm between them due to the MAX DCT in N France being 10nm
It seems certain that many “foreigners” who reasonably expected a continued IFR clearance have busted CAS and had all kinds of other trouble and I have seen some improvements over the past few years. It used to be more or less necessary to return from France to the UK at FL120+ to get a handover to London Control (i.e. oxygen altitudes) but I see it is now OK lower down.
Third World more like…
But I am not an isolated case. Since my visit, there have been various other similar reports covering large chunks of UK airspace.
[This guy had a particully bad day…](http://www.pprune.org/biz-jets-ag-flying-ga-etc/448092-me-uk-atc-system.html)
For those who operate in this environment regularly it ceases to be out of the ordinary, and you no doubt develop techniques to make it work. But to the occasional visitor it stands out as really backward.
E
That is atrocious, for a Class D airport connected fully to the CAS system.
That treatment must be reserved for light GA. No way would they do it to AOC traffic, or any jets, IMHO.
