The absolute worst things in GA

As a fixed-wing pilot:

• ambiguity on availability of parking (e.g. Cannes) which often means you just need to try your luck, or be French
• lack of Avgas in Italy
• high minimum altitudes for airways

As a rotary pilot:

• being made to taxi down taxiways at empty airports (especially Spain)
• huge landing charges at small strips that are often larger than planes that need to use tarmac (e.g. Enstone) when it’s free to land in the field next door
• being told I can’t land because the airfield is closed due to runway contamination (happened in Spain)

As both:

• handling charges when I need no handling
• AENA airports, universally
• Fraport airports, universally
• minor STCs costing thousands (e.g. adding an iPad bracket)
• obsession with high visibility jackets in many airfields (looking at you in particular, Land’s End)
• poor RT with many weekend flyers, who just LOVE talking on the radio

1. Cowpats, especially fresh ones.
2. Checking/changing/fixing anything under the panel.

As for high viz jackets…

I think I know the event which triggered that. A captain of an airline well known to many of us was killed on a UK airport doing his walk around in semidarkness when he was hit by a handling vehicle. He was severely injured, lost both his legs and eventually succumbed to his injuries. It was a huge shock to all of us who knew him. Shortly thereafter the UK mandated high viz jackets everywhere, followed by EASA.

Now I have been driving on airports for close to 40 years now, old fart that I am. I’ve had two fender benders: One at night time hitting another vehicle I could not see from the angle in the surprisingly dark conditions, two hitting a signpost with a beton pillar below in daylight. Both were difficult to detect. I’ve often enough seen situations both on the major airport I work at and on airfields where high visibility is highly desirable for anything which is moving or situated where you won’t necessarily expect it.

I am all for wearing high viz jackets on the tarmac. Doing so in coffeeshops e.t.c. is obviously not required and sometimes rather a thing like wearing stripes or so, but I will confess that I’ve been too lazy to take mine off occasionally during a short stop. By definition you can’t leave them in the plane so you’d have to carry them with you, so I sometimes simply kept it on, as that is more comfy and I like my hands free.

Sometimes when I go for a walk in darkness, I put it on as well if I walk on a road sometimes used by cars. Where I live, it is really dark once you leave the last houses behind. Driving home from work I’ve occasionally come by walkers who are hardly visible at all. I have decided for myself that it is the lesser evil to make myself visible than to end up having a roadside pub named after myself like the notorious “Flat Hedgehog” which used to be situated somewhere around Sussex.

I would say instructors telling newcomers all the negatives of flying upfront, and bad maintenance shops.

Mooney_Driver wrote:

I am all for wearing high viz jackets on the tarmac.

Depends on the tarmac. A passenger terminal with aircraft coming in and pushing back all the time and service vehicles buzzing around is one thing. A sleepy GA apron during daytime, with a 20 meter walk to the GA terminal is something else.

Jujupilote wrote:

I would say instructors telling newcomers all the negatives of flying upfront

+28-day club check-outs when you have hundreds of hours (doesn’t affect me now though)

Airborne_Again wrote:

Depends on the tarmac.

^ This!

The substitution of common sense with one-size-fits-all regulations being pushed down from the big iron to the low end of GA, without doing a probability and risk analysis.

Yellow jackets are really a perfect example. An airline captain gets hit at night at a large airport by a service vehicle, so we need to wear hi-viz jackets everywhere in daytime on every grass strip? Also, we can fly a plane but cannot be trusted to decide ourselves when and where it may make sense to put on a hi-viz?

Similarly, a small jet overruns the runway in Samedan, and all piston aircraft pilots (and not the jet ones!) have to do a theory quiz every two years as a result of that. Or, a pilot buys an old plane with corroded engine, loses power on take-off (again in Samedan) and as a result, everyone has to pull their cylinders at TBO?

At night they are useful for aircraft to taxi, daylight over the grass they make you less visible !
I understand that NOT wearing them make you more visible

In some airport you are not allowed to wear high-vis cloths from cycling shops but they are happy with roadwork kit

…not being able to go fly on a beautiful evening like this because the airport is closed.