One bit which struck me while completing the survey in the other thead is how the high prices of landing / handling e.t.c. at certain airfields would influence my decision making in case of diversion / emergency.
Let’s say you are on a flight 10 NM from a 500 Euro airport and experience tech difficulties. Now will you land there or try to nurse it into a 20 NM distanced place with “normal” fees? I would think that many pilots would probably shy away from landing at e.g. Frankfurt in such a case and try to nurse it to Reichelsheim or Egelsbach, even though this would increase the risk significantly.
Or same scenario if someone was closer to Gatwick than Redhill or Biggin and trying to nurse it away from the big airport due to being scared not being able to pay the fees.
I recall that there was talk of a regulation which would waive fees in case that landings are made in such cases but can’t remember how it was.
The UK did have an initiative whereby landing fees got waived in such cases (also on a weather diversion). This is still running in the UK and AFAIK most small GA airfields are participating. The “London Area” airports (Gatwick, Heathrow, Luton, Stansted, London City) were not contacted. A few others have refused to participate, citing bogus diversions as the reason.
France has an interesting scheme and post #13 in that thread details the UK scheme.
One pilot here did land a DA42 (with what looked at the time like an engine fire) at Gatwick and it was sitting there for months, running up a massive bill. However I vaguely recall hearing that the bill was waived or reduced in the end.
Peter wrote:
Don’t the US airports also get the FAA funding?
Not all of them.
The airfield I was based at for about 4 years (KSPX, Houston Gulf) was private. It received no government money (and indeed paid taxes), yet somehow despite not charging absurd fees managed to remain profitable. It made its money from:
No landing fees were charged. Overnight stays for visiting aircraft were just a few dollars a night. There was no PPR requirement. You didn’t have to sign an indemnity to arrive after the airport closed at 7pm, and there was pilot controlled lighting. There were no silly rules such as ‘no maintenance in the hangar’ or ‘you must use only the maintenance business on the airfield’. As such hangar space was in high demand there. The only strict rule about hangars were that the aircraft inside had to be flying, they didn’t want hangar queens not buying any fuel and taking up valuable hangar space which someone wanted for an aircraft that was actually getting flown.
Unfortunately due to a number of circumstances (the airport was ultimately owned by a company owned by a member of the Bin Laden family, and this attracted a lot of bad publicity after 2001-09-11, and a property sha^Wdeveloper willing to pay a lot of money for building identikit McMansions in the rapidly growing Houston area means it’s now a housing estate rather than an airport (Federal funding would have probably prevented this).
I’ve just checked the fees with Cannes for our upcoming trip
Up to 2T………….
Passenger and Landing Fee: 25.69
Handling on Tango Apron: 59.66
Extra Days parking: 50% of landing Fee.
I would rather pay the handling fee than park on the grass and have that long walk.
Peter wrote:
(…)LFMD(…)It was a very smooth experience though, as one would expect of an airport with bizjet traffic. Well, except for yet another French ATC strike which completely screwed up the day, forcing a VFR departure which takes you way out over the sea and wastes about an hour if going north
Hu? The VFR exit routes are about 10nmi long at most, and one of them is substantially to the west. Even the South-West one cannot cost 1h. I flew VFR between LFMD and ELLX in August 2016, and I don’t understand your “1h wasted” comment. From ELLX to LFMD, I flew quasi-direct, I only made a slight detour to go through Geneva TMA at the requested VFR crossing path. This brought me to LFMD’s WL entry point which is a stone’s throw from the WD exit point. So on the other way round, you can exit WD and then take your path north.
I plotted the GPS track log on that day and it is here. Ignore the track to the east of LFMD; that is the LDSB-LFMD flight a few hours before. In the rest of it you can see the long dogleg to the south, before I was allowed to turn back and climb with an IFR clearance.
I would rather pay the handling fee than park on the grass and have that long walk.
My recollection of the grass is that it was of poor quality and that is rarely worth the risk.
Peter wrote:
In the rest of it you can see the long dogleg to the south
12 NM?
Peter wrote:
I plotted the GPS track log on that day and it is here. Ignore the track to the east of LFMD; that is the LDSB-LFMD flight a few hours before. In the rest of it you can see the long dogleg to the south, before I was allowed to turn back and climb with an IFR clearance.
I have zero experience with IFR pickups from a VFR take-off. That’s indeed a different situation than what I had in mind. For my education, any specific reason you didn’t go in northerly direction under VFR (staying in class E or G airspace in the absence of a clearance), and awaited your IFR+climb clearance while already flying in the right direction? Did ATC specifically ask you to go wait for your IFR+climb clearance to the South, they could fit you in the IFR flow more easily that way? Even before that, did TWR refuse you the WD2 departure route?
My recollection of the grass is that it was of poor quality and that is rarely worth the risk.
Indeed I was shocked by it. Some plants were coming up more than one metre (!).
It was a complicated scenario, where an IFR “I” FP was cancelled (due to the French ATC strike) and replaced with a “Z” one (VFR-IFR-VFR; that was possibly a mistake actually since I didn’t want a VFR arrival in the UK and it should have been a “Y” but I don’t recall the details around getting it validated) with the initial VFR portion going right across the ATC strike area. There is also a long standing issue with Nice traffic where they keep people way down at 500ft above the sea and this affects Cannes. It was a difficult day, with ~50kt winds from the north, heavy turbulence at low level over the sea, and pretty extreme turbulence on landing.
The grass situation is a good example of one man’s grass being different from another man’s grass – it’s like asking a farmer if some track is OK to drive up, and he says Yes I do it all day, not caring you drive a Ford Ka 
Or asking people about places to ski – that one is almost totally hopeless
Going back to the topic, the €100 (necessary to pay to avoid the risk of a €20k prop strike) is perhaps not going to kill the traffic of the people who might go to Cannes once a year, but it is going to kill visitors who might fly monthly or more. At say €30 it would be a much smaller issue. It also completely wipes out French aeroclub traffic but from flying around France a bit over the years, and doing mostly the bigger places (due to the need for customs/immigration and IFR), I reckon some 99% of French aeroclub traffic has been avoiding these bigger airports since for ever, anyway… I think the aeroclub traffic flies mainly between “club” airfields and goes nowhere near places like Cannes, Biarritz, Bergerac, Le Touquet, La Rochelle, Tarbes… so no wonder airports like Cannes probably think that at €100 they are not losing much traffic – and they are probably right!
But, having written the above paragraph, this is the same thing as the perpetual UK GA debate on the “UK aviation pub sites” where you get constant calls to boycott any place charging £30 (Shoreham is a popular target although Biggin, same fee, has managed to avoid the attacks). It is soon realised however that most of the said group are people who fly almost totally between farm strips and their calls for a £5 landing fee would bankrupt the whole of the UK (almost wholly non-subsidised) GA infrastructure. So an airport charging £30 is not losing any significant traffic… same as Cannes charging €100 is not losing any significant traffic.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
et’s say an airfield of the size of Samedan or Cannes decides to price out GA because they think them not worth the hassle. My answer to them is, what hassle. it is YOU who impose the hassle to us. In theory, all that happens is that small GA use an infrastructure which is there anyway for the desirable clients and gets you some more money. Granted, not that much, but hey, let’s say 10000 movements per year with 30 Euros fees is still 300’000 Euros plus what people consume in terms of restraurants, rental cars and regional hotels e.t.c. AND, you avoid pissing off voters and supporters when you need them to sign the next petition.Fact is, all those airfields are there and their infrastructure are open for the biggies without a single small plane landing. So their claim that the small planes cost them extra is false to a large extent. They do use an infrastructure which is there anyway and they are willing to pay for this within reason. By imposing handling e.t.c. (which usually does not go into the airports pocketbook) they price out people who would help support the infrastructure even if it may be considered negligible. And to make it so all they need to do is keep a side door open for us and sweep the GA parking from time to time. Any maybe they can get some more cash from the Avgas franchise.
Deciding to price out GA is almost never a rational act. It is in most cases an act of irrational hatred by some jobsworth bureaucrat who for some reason hates small planes. Where it is rational, people will most of the time understand and be good about it as long as there are reasonable alternatives. But in the cases where there are not, such as in Ibiza, Cannes (Nice is not really an alternate is it) and Samedan, I would be supportive of an infrastructure law which forces them to accept small GA at rates which are in relation to the work they generate to the airport.
It wo
I agree a very rational argument. Showing numbers is the only way. (Exaggeration coming)Then somehow imply that one or more of them can siphon money off into there pockets will usually tip the scales.
