Airpots with customs, Avgas and long hard runways are very rare in the southeast of Italy. Now Foggia LIBF (which has never been all too cheap and has always been a bit on the bureaucratic side, but still ok) has gone bonkers and also seems to be effectively lost to GA.
Are those stories verified? I am still waiting for a verification (someone has been on holiday) of this story (presumably posted on the same site) which doesn’t hang together.
It is not difficult to get charged silly money in these southern European countries, due to lack of transparency and “handling cartels”.
GA likes to avoid handling, so there is usually a predatory handler who drives up to each landing plane immediately, so the pilot doesn’t get a chance to escape being handled. The handler “offers his services” in a manner which pre-empts anything. This is the oldest tactic at airports, which is why GA pilots who know the game will sort out the requirements well ahead. On this fly-in we could have easily been thus trapped and it took ages plus a local language speaker to organise it.
Today, no pilot flying internationally should fly to some airport and get hit with a €378 handling bill as a total surprise. These guys perhaps didn’t do any due diligence before simply jumping into a plane but who does that these days?
What is needed is an Italian speaker to phone the airport and find out exactly what the setup is. And post a detailed report.
The setup is mandatory handling via Flyservice (www.flyservice.eu) and the website already tells you it’s going to be expensive…
…expensive to the tune of 100 EUR for handling & marshalling (because god forbid you run somebody over on an empty airport), landing authorization 100 EUR, fuel coordination 27 EUR (SEP numbers).
I can confirm first-hand the no food bit.
I phoned Cuneo-Levaldigi LIMZ this morning to ask about prices for a C172 overnight stay.
The handler Delta Aerotaxi requested I send an email with details and credit card number to receive a quote. I asked what price I could expect and was told between 150 and 200 euro.
At this point I am not even sending the email.
The majority of mid-size and big-size airports of Italy are now firmly in the 250€-territory for small GA aircraft. Mostly because they have been infested by commercial handling agents (FlyService, Delta, SkyServices…), which charge both for the PPR and the handling.
The landing, parking and pax fees are still rather moderate, but that doesn‘t help.
What are the chances of Aosta and Bolzano doing the same? They don’t have any significant scheduled flights AFAIK.
Hard to say. Even Foggia, Salerno and others don‘t have any airline traffic.
I can think of two ways how this happens. It’s either the company managing operations at the airport (societá di gestione) getting tired of doing the handling for the GA riff-raff and tired of replying to all those PPR/do you have fuel?/how much does it all cost? phonecalls and emails, inducing them to give a concession to one or more of these handling agent chains to operate as a GA handling agent there.
Or it could be the other way around, i.e. the handling agent chains contacting one after the other airport and saying „hey, if you want, I am going to take care of all the riff raff out there and all the correspondence and paperwork for you“.
In any case, it seems to be very intriguing for the airport companies to do this. The fact that the GA traffic (below the turboprop segment) will vanish does not really bother any of them.
ENAC might also play a certain role there. You knows what requirements (requisiti) they are setting out for „airport handling agents“. Think „safety and security“. They might be so silly and onerous that the airport companies just say „go away, let some „dedicated“ people do this…
The term “Talibans of the Apron” is more apropriate. Stayed at Salerno 3 times in the past and payed some ridiculous 10€ to the airborn Fire fighters doing the handling there.Foggia too,was a non-event for Greeks using it.
I can think of two ways how this happens
This happened some years ago at Shoreham. A certain character (not a word I would use but he may be reading this) convinced the then airport manager that if they give him a handling concession for > 1500kg, he will bring in loads of TP and jet business, and fuel sales.
Nobody realised the runway is too short for much of that traffic… The 1500kg threshold removed 100% of piston twin traffic and nearly all SR22 traffic. It cost about £100 to land an SR22 there.
Eventually the management realised they had been conned and pulled the plug on this, but the business took years to recover.
Now if you have management which doesn’t actually want aircraft landing there and sees the airport as just somewhere where ~50 people can sit all day and get paid (which is the case in much of southern Europe) then this is perfect.
Peter wrote:
Now if you have management which doesn’t actually want aircraft landing there and sees the airport as just somewhere where ~50 people can sit all day and get paid (which is the case in much of southern Europe) then this is perfect.
The problem is that such approach necessarily leads to airport closure and then local community loses important infrastructure object (usually very hard to recover) which in the end damages local economy.
