That ruling is however almost useless because the airports circumvent it, initially by most of the handlers ignoring the communications on the topic 
See the Menorca fly-in report, 2017.
What happens is that if you try to utilise that legal concession to the full, nobody at the airport will respond to you so you can’t fly there.
Another thing the handlers do is (as a caricature) charge €1 for the handling and €199 for mandatory ice cream, and since there is no law in Spain making mandatory ice cream illegal, this works too
Dear All,
I am very pleased to inform that the petition to European Commision (requesting investigation of pricing policies of airports/ handlers towards General Aviation flights) was sent last week
It took few months longer than it was initially expected, mainly due to the fact that at some point we made a decision about trying to get not only the signature of the AOPA Greece but also of other European AOPA’s under this petition. So at the end we have managed to get the signatures on behalf of AOPAs: Greece, Cyprus, Bulgaria, Poland and Sweden. This way we have five different countries represented, asking for price investigation of the airports fee area.
At some point we decided that such five should be good enough to get the attention of appropriate EU body, but of course during the process we had asked all the European AOPAs for their signatures. The named ones are the once that were willing/ found time to sign and send the appropriate power of attorney to our legal company. Many thanks to Kyprianos from AOPA Greece for his immense help in this whole process, from it’s beginning to the last phase of signatures collection.
And once again – greetings and warm thanks to all the financial backers and all you who devoted your time with comments, sent copies of invoices etc.
The petition document please find (FYI) here:
https://we.tl/t-40a5TFmSIi
There are also other documents associated with the petition (an extra dozens of pages of various analyses), but these, for the sake of the process, we have decided to keep only for the information of EC.
From now on the further steps (EU level) are to the large extend dependant on EU officials. Hopefully, they will share our view about the unfair treatment of GA across a number of airports in Europe and will find a way to cure the current situation.
Our flying is seriously affected, GA related businesses in Europe are harmed, let’s hope this call will get an attention.
And few words of the financial part – the crowdfunding brought us 6950 Euro and at the end (after paying K&K fees, platforms provisions and currency conversions) there is 311,73 Euro left. My suggestion would be to keep them for a while, just in case any extra expenses appear. If not – let’s pay from that for some small celebration of the current milestone during the Euroga’s fly-in maybe?
If we need more money I am happy to contribute, I also think that we need to expose the pressure that the budget airlines put on these mid size airports, its not all handlers not wanting to deal with us – they all want straight in approaches fast turnarounds and no delays – specifically they do not want to be put in a hold or held on the ground for a puddle jumper wandering into the area looking to land, I have heard of contractual penalties for airports for delays in this case.
On top of the free ride they get on not paying excise taxes on Jet A – while we get stung on avgas it drives me nuts.
Bart wrote:
The named ones are the once that were willing/ found time to sign and send the appropriate power of attorney to our legal company.
I’m surprised that no more than five were willing to do that!
I am not
Simple power politics. Each time something positive happens in GA, every GA body claims credit for it
I need to dig around for what EuroGA can claim credit for There must be something… Actually there is a lot, but it is less visible (more people making better use of their PPL) or happens indirectly e.g. a big increase in GA traffic to some airports which have prominently featured here (the Adriatic comes to mind).
Peter wrote:
Simple power politics. Each time something positive happens in GA, every GA body claims credit for it
In that case why wouldn’t they want to be on the bandwagon?
Because they are already having their own “lunches” with various bodies… Probably also some AOPAs have airports as corporate members.
Well, if the present case produces a positive outcome, it will make real sense to start negotiating EuroGA’s status as a new supranational chapter of AOPA.
Bartt – I contributed to the crowdfunding inititiave and would like to see the outcome and pending complaint with the EC.
The ink posted here is now time expired – please can this be updated so I can get the documents
https://we.tl/t-40a5TFmSIi
Thanks
