The other one in Barcelona.
The big one, El Prat. Where you can wait an hour for the fuel truck. And plan for fifteen minutes taxi time each way. And pay 400 Euros for a small plate of sliced fruit for the passengers plus 200 Euros delivery charge. And another hundred Euros for a bag of ice cubes. And after takeoff it is going to be a 128 nautical mile long departure route for which you will get zero shortcuts and zero early climb clearances so that you will burn half a ton of fuel for nothing. Multiply all that with a factor of two and you know what Madrid Barajas is like…
Lovely!
what_next wrote:
The big one, El Prat
Yes, expensive, inconvenient and they still make you feel like you are getting in their way. Yet you fly into Schiphol, Munich, Berlin, Düsseldorf, Koln, Nice and you get none of that. Spain is a wonderful country, with many good airports. But some are really bad.
My biggest fear was getting nailed for the VAT but then again I didnt have too many Locals (Europeans) to ask before I came here. It took months to gather all the info. Mike should not be too afraid to do. It will be challenge but then what isnt.
A question I do have is about sharing costs. I thought they relaxed that rule in Europe. I have a bunch of friends that want to go to Carcassonne with me. Technically I could charge the hourly cost of the flight and as long as everyone shares equally in the cost and as long as its for the same purpose according to the FAA its not an illegal part 135.
So is it just Corp owned aircraft that are scrutinized or is it everyone?
C210_Flyer wrote:
A question I do have is about sharing costs. I thought they relaxed that rule in Europe.
What they are not too relaxed about in some countries are the cost sharing online services like for example Wingly and COAVMI.
Cost sharing with co-workers, friends and family should not pose any issues.
Indeed cost sharing with friends is not the issue. If you have people onboard, who you don’t really know, who are paying for the flight, because they happened to want to go to where you are flying to, that isn’t cost sharing.
According to the UK CAA it is… kind of.
boscomantico wrote:
At this stage, it looks like you already managed to talk yourself out of doing this adventure.It depends on the time of day, phase of the moon. I have not decided at this point. I’m doing what any pilot would do, collect as much information than make a go/no go decision weighing all the risks and benefits. It may seem like I am focused on the negative, but that is what risk assessment is all about.
There is another angle to it, too: now that we have learned a bit more about your destinations and your schedule, it honestly looks like this is a perfect case of taking the airlines. I mean:
- most of your destinations are well served by the airlines
- you seem to know exactly when you’d like to go where, with little flexibility
Being very close to deciding not to go, I was having the same thought. So I spent some time looking at that. After doing that a bit, the plane started looking better.
The main issue is that being in Grantham means you are not close to airports with non stop flights, or the one stop flights take a freaky long time.
For example, Oslo. Gatwick is the prime choice, non stop for low cost. But it takes 2.5+ hours whether by car or train to Gatwick from Grantham. Have to be there 2 hours prior for international (and to allow for travel delay tolerance). Flight takes 2+ hours. Add it all up, 7 hours. Any other airport is longer because it is either Heathrow or the flight is 1+ stops.
EGNE to EGNM is 2 hours in my plane, so under 3 hours with drive to EGNE and preflight. Also, the flight leaves EXACTLY when I want, so departure latency doesn’t come into play. For example, the non stop EGKK to ENGM leaves 0920, 1500, and 1910. Assuming we can leave at 1600 on a Thursday, the 1910 flight is too tight, so we miss an entire day, and then that requires getting up 0500 to get the early flight! The airplane just makes this all work much better.
When we were in Grantham in 2007, we managed to take only one airline trip the whole semester, to Geneva. It was just too hard to get to where the airlines are from middle England. I was hoping the plane would free us to do much more this time. This is exactly the same benefit the plane has to me in the US, I live far away from major airline hubs but yet I can go anywhere in the US faster than the airlines can.
That amount may just about be enough to hangar your MU-2 for one month in England. All in all, taking just the variable flying costs alone, this adventure (including insurance, fuel, hangarage, airport fees, airway fees, flight support etc., but also the cost of the transcontinental flight) might run into well over 50k$.
Yeah, but I’ve reached the age where one starts to think that the money is either to be used to do what you want or make your estate larger when you die.
you should really ask yourself: will I really enjoy all this, including learning to master a very different, in many ways more difficult GA environment?
That is THE question. To answer that question, I am trying to live vicariously through this forum on what it is like to fly in Europe, to model the experience in my mind. So far, the forum is long on encouragement and generalities (which are helpful, mind you), but I am a bit short on hard facts and figures. I will start collecting those through the laborious act of calling lots of airports and asking lots of questions not in their native language. Let me see how far that goes.
Mike C.
mciholas wrote:
I will start collecting those through the laborious act of calling lots of airports and asking lots of questions not in their native language. Let me see how far that goes.
I think that is not the good start:
That’s what I would do
mciholas wrote:
For example, Oslo.My bad, expedia doesn’t check the low cost European carriers.
RyanAir runs a non stop STN to RYG flight with good timing. Depart STN 1935 Thu, return 2155 Sun. STN is 90 minutes by car from Grantham. RYG is actually closer to where I want to go (Halden) saving time on that end.
That kind of makes the airline argument pretty strong. Exploring other destinations, it is becoming clear I can probably make the airlines work reasonably well with the budget carriers.
The main goal was traveling in Europe with the freedom and time savings I enjoy in the US so we can see more things. The personal achievement of crossing the Atlantic was not really so much the objective, nor mastering European air traffic and airports. In light of that, perhaps the best plan is to leave the plan home, fly the airlines (check the budget carriers), and to find some other outlet for my flying addiction.
Tomorrow, I will probably flip back to flying my plane. Stay tuned…
Mike C.
