Peter wrote:
IMHO there are no places in Europe that are more attractive than (the right parts of) Greece
I think by “attractive” it was meant as an aviation experience, not the tourist, non-aviation elements which is what it sounds like you interpreted, Peter.
The aviation experience is also top class. Greece is a highly scenic place to fly. It is – currently – the cost of the ground stuff that gets people. In years past they also subjected you to all kinds of bizzare procedures (e.g. having to walk up to the tower at LGKR to file a handwritten flight plan, even if you had internet capability) and this kind of stuff is still present but to a much smaller degree since e.g. Olympic were privatised years ago. In the last few years things were actually pretty smooth and mostly reasonably priced. Until Fraport screwed up the costs just recently.
I speak as someone who has actually flown to Greece many times in my TB20, since 2004, so I have a bit of perspective on it. In many ways it is much easier there because nobody there expects a visitor to speak Greek, whereas in certain countries they do expect any visitor to speak Spanish, French, Italian… and if you can’t you can bang your head against a brick wall for hours. My head banging experience at say Salamanca or Pamplona or Burgos or Bastia or… vastly exceeds anything I have had in Greece 
If you want info on a Greek airport’s opening hours etc, you check notams or phone them. If you are at a Greek airport, you can speak to somebody there. Try doing that in Spain, France… you can spend an hour looking for someone who speaks English, for someone who can work the “self service” fuel pump, etc. At Carcassonne, nobody knew how to work the “self service” pump, and ATC told us to get stuffed; not their problem. It was only a phone call to a colleague who spoke French who then phoned up the manager that suddenly caused a man to appear.
Unfortunately aviation has its fair share of hassles almost everywhere you go, but the ones I find hardest are the ones where even at an international airport nobody speaks English. Like the “tourist info” desk at Zaragoza…
I could go on and on and on, about weird and pointless stuff that goes on in supposedly civilised countries.
I (having flown to GR many times since 2003) disagree. And I know a couple of people who have given it up, because they were treated so badly.
I have flown to Corfu, Megara, Milos and a couple of times to Heraklion, but they always created unnecessary problems – and worse. Airports that are open 1 or 2 hours every day, the fuel situation, the general arrogance of every official (“this is Greece and we don’t give a shit about your flight plan on the iPad”). No tiedowns, crazy rules (on Milos: “only the Captain can go to the airplane” ).
Or how about this: Takeoff in +30 kts wind and the TWR changes his clearance when I was rotating and yelled at me when I answered “stand by” to read back the new clearance (“read back NOW”).
My favourite, in Corfu: Where do I show my passport? “You don’t need a Passport, this is Schengen”.
I will still go. We have an appartment there (on Crete) and we love the island, the food and the (normal) people, but aviation is really a joke.
One exception: MEGARA (and the help of my friend Petakas!) was a great experience. Refueling within 5 minutes, a hangar for a week for € 150, … all very nice. Okay, there’s one guy in the C office Petakas warned me about (“do not talk back”), but he wasn’t on duty.
Not a “top class” experience for me.
You haven’t written anything which disagrees with what I wrote… which started with “The aviation experience is also top class” (note the emphasis).
A small detail: of Corfu, Megara, Milos and Heraklion, only one is open close to “1 or 2 hours every day” but you only need to read the Notam and fly accordingly:
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The one real problem with these opening hours is that one can’t do a day trip there, and some (very few IME) inter-island flights are not possible directly (sometimes they are possible in an F16 ).
As regards “only the Captain can go to the airplane”, who cares? It’s silly but on the scale of hassles in flying, it’s really a non-issue.
I don’t pick fights with airport staff, and last time I was at LGKR (for a quick stop) the avgas truck was there before I shut down the engine. I allowed 2hrs but had to bring the onward FP nearer by an hour. Yes, they still do the walk to the handler and then the other walk to the (airside) CAA office but at 10 mins each… and everyone speaks English.
What catches out “north Europeans” in Greece is that they expect to do everything ad-hoc i.e. jump in the plane and fly. One can’t do that in Greece.
OTOH half of N Europe is PPR or PNR, too…
Well, I did care, because I had to make a repair – and they did not allow my copilot (a pilot, with a licence) on the ramp to help me, so it took me 4 hours … (Milos, no other airplane on the ramp).
Of course I know all those NOTAMs about the opening hours.
ATC isn’t really helpful either, many times. Approaching Milos on an IFR FPL they did not let me descend from FL120 when the island was underneath! “You have to cancel IFR” to descend" …
Probably the average experience is somewhere between what Peter and Alexis described. Mine is much closer to Alexis’s but it’s very recent and one shouldn’t be surprised – ripped off at Corfu (LGKR) and Kafalonia (LGKF), paid what I expected at Heraklion (LGIR) and got proper GA service (landing, car ride to building and 3 days of parking) at Megara (LGMG) for 5€.
Given the scale of this phenomenon – not only in Greece but cropping up all over Europe – I suspect fighting it from the top down may be more effective in the long term than negotiating with FRAPORT and the like. Looks very much like a violation of Article 102 of the EU Treaty:
Article 102Any abuse by one or more undertakings of a dominant position within the internal market or in a substantial part of it shall be prohibited as incompatible with the internal market in so far as it may affect trade between Member States.
Such abuse may, in particular, consist in:
(a) directly or indirectly imposing unfair purchase or selling prices or other unfair trading conditions;
(b) limiting production, markets or technical development to the prejudice of consumers;
(c) applying dissimilar conditions to equivalent transactions with other trading parties, thereby placing them at a competitive disadvantage;
(d) making the conclusion of contracts subject to acceptance by the other parties of supplementary obligations which, by their nature or according to commercial usage, have no connection with the subject of such contracts.
Any lawyers among us? 
Lobbying the European Commission through our local MEPs to strengthen the self-handling provisions may also be useful.
I think one needs to separate high costs from a poor service.
The former is unjustifiable but most affected pilots hope it will be resolved – simply because GA within Greece will be dead very soon. Based on what I hear locally, I am hopeful.
The latter is endemic in all of Southern Europe and always has been – with a few exceptions e.g. modern Croatia. Southern Europe (and in this context that includes France) has always run itself “they way they have always run themselves” i.e. on a nod and a wink system and who knows who and who can speak the local language with the right sort of “emphasis” e.g. it’s a lot easier to get an aeroclub to sell you avgas (illegally) if you can talk the right way. Been there many times… got some really funny smiles at Treviso after being told they have avgas Got an even funnier smile at Oristano, standing right next to the avgas pump. And in this respect, Greece has got a lot better over the years – for a visiting pilot. Probably not for someone from the north who wants to emigrate there, buy a house and maybe start a small business, and thinks he can do it the “French way” i.e. the proverbial box of wine to the local mayor… Greece has always had bigger obstacles to that than anybody else in the EU, but for the visiting pilots they compensate IMHO a lot by speaking English. In general, Europe gets less and less transparent (in both individual and corporate behaviour) as one goes further south. The locals are usually OK with it because they know their local rules.
At the other end, a €5 fee at LGMG is clearly unsustainable – same as a €5 fee at some airport in France, or landing at Dinard and getting the invoice a year later. These airports will see changes one day, and they will be sudden and usually crude in magnitude. If they charged say €30 they might well be sustainable.
Ultranomad wrote:
Given the scale of this phenomenon – not only in Greece but cropping up all over Europe – I suspect fighting it from the top down may be more effective in the long term than negotiating with FRAPORT and the like. Looks very much like a violation of Article 102 of the EU Treaty:
Not a lawyer, but I have gathered some first hand knowledge in how this is applied. I am 100 % with you in believing this is the only way we will be able to fight extortionate handling and other fees and conditions at airports around Europe. But it would require an organization to weigh in with the European Commission to get them interested in this, because they don’t act if it’s only one private pilot complaining about one invoice.
It is clear to me that this is a prime case for Article 102, but the commission applies some thresholds in order to decide which cases to prosecute and which ones to drop in order to efficiently spend their limited resources. In order to make a case, you’d have to calculate how much money is actually lost in the whole of the EU by individuals and businesses not even going to other EU countries due to the transport infrastructure being mismanaged by such local monopolies.
Rwy20 wrote:
In order to make a case, you’d have to calculate how much money is actually lost in the whole of the EU by individuals and businesses not even going to other EU countries due to the transport infrastructure being mismanaged by such local monopolies.
Yes, and there are several distinct aspects to that:
1. We as consumers having to pay through the nose for the service by monopolies – easily quantifiable from statistics
2. Flights never taken – very approximately quantifiable from changes in traffic after privatisations like the one in questoin
3. Impact on transport connectivity due to segregation of “light” and “heavy” traffic – loss of many small branches on the big tree of routes; loss of small-scale local commercial operators who are priced out of the market due to high operating costs
4. Impact on safety caused by fewer hours flown, less familiarity with different places, and the fear of having to pay a lot in case of diversion
5. Impact on the supply of better qualified pilots imtimately familiar with the operational and economic aspects of flying, the joys of single-pilot IFR, etc.
3-4-5 are quite hard to quantify.
