GA airport survival - a case study from Poland

I might have an interesting data point on GA decline – specifically on survival of GA-friendly airports.

Aeroklub Slaski maintains EPKM – a GA airport near Katowice.

When the airport was built in the first place (in 1920), it was far from the city center. But now it occupies a very good spot for housing. Lots of cycling and enjoying the nature possible nearby, while at the same time close to the motorway and the High Street. A few years ago someone actually built a housing complex nearby.

We regularly get complaints from the residents about noise etc. – seems like they did not notice the airport while buying the flats and moving in. Or, who knows, maybe someone told them that no one is actually flying these times and we are closing anyway etc. Very easy to suggest that to your client if you are a property broker and I just don’t believe everyone is ethical, in any profession. We can only hope that most people are, but that’s it.

Now back to our precious airport. The city sometimes likes us, and sometimes not. Depends on who wins the local elections. And of course it depends which department we deal with, since the city is a proper System behaving in accordance to General Systemantics and not like a coherent entity. Sometimes they say they will get us EU funding – and sometimes they say there are no reasons for us to exist if EPGL is just 20 minutes drive away The guys in charge right now are moderately indifferent. They said we owe them property tax. That’s 0,5M PLN per year (1 PLN is 0.2 GBP). Even if they wanted to be nice and exempt us, that’s not politically correct right now. We are located next to a large park/forest area. Last year there was a lot of fuss in the newspapers about a few trees we had to shorten to comply with CAA requirements. The media presented it almost as if we requested a complete deforestation within 5 km of airport.

So we thought we would register as a public airport, which makes us exempt from property tax by law – or maybe gives us a big discount, not sure on that.

The CAA said “Well, OK. But you guys really need to fix your runway.”

Which indeed needs fixing anyway, because time and another our aircraft suffer damage from its roughness.

The runway is rough because it seems the mine had taken coal from underneath. The mine says they hadn’t. So we went to court in hope we can make the mine pay for fixing the runway. The mines here are owned by the state and technically bankrupt. However the government is very determined to keep them running in any way possible, so that the miners do not invade Warsaw and paralyze the parliament. Which had already happened in the past and is a very negative experience for the government in charge and citizens of Warsaw.

So the mine we sued was closed as a part of some creative accounting effort by the Polish government – so that the EU is not in position to complain about state aid or something like that. You surely heard something about our current government. They are determined and stick hard to their definitions of fair play.

In the end we now have to sue another mine, which took over that original mine assets. Which means it will all take even more precious time.

In the meantime, the city wants their money and the CAA wants the runway fixed – or else.

So we fixed half of the runway. This helped our aircraft a lot, because obviously we first fixed the part that gets more used in the prevailing winds. However it only half pleased the CAA. And it cost us 5M PLN. And there is no reason why fixing the other half would cost us less.

Last Sunday we had a General Assembly and discussed what to do next. A very interesting experience for me – the youngest and least important member of the club’s board, having served on the board voluntarily for a year and not really familiar with the whole story.

The President suggests chopping off a small piece of land off the airport and selling it. A wealthy member says this piece of land should be divided into hangar-sized parts and sold to members for “aviation use only”. Lawyers are analyzing it, but it could be that you can’t sell a piece of land and be absolutely sure no one builds housing there. And if it comes to this anyway – then smaller plots of land are worth much less per square meter than a big plot.

The club’s President is an architect. The wealthy member professionally deals in housing and office property. The wealthy member is a former president and the two gentleman do not get along well. So the reasonable, ordinary members wonder if there might be some plot involved – and by whom. The less reasonable ask why doesn’t the EU pay us for fixing the runway.

The moderately crazy say we can raise the money almost instantly by building hangars on that land and collect fees for hangarage. Hangaring a Cessna 172 costs some 0.015M PLN per year here.

The openly insane say we should train more PPLs and sell more AVGAS. Well, our yearly turnover from flying, basic training, selling AVGAS and such was 3,1M PLN in 2019 and 2,2M PLN the previous year. And the direct costs are larger than that, the loss being covered by non-aviation business like renting the airport grounds for mass events, car racing on the runway etc.

Can we take advantage of our premium location and start a profitable business that would pay the property tax or – better – fix the runway? Theoretically – yes. Practically – from my experience in other contexts, this is very difficult when you are a non-profit organisation and your shareholders – ie. members – mostly have no clue about business and can hardly distinguish between terms like “total assets” and “cash in hand” – as I personally witnessed on the General Assembly.

Accusations of ill will and incompetence on social media continue as usual.

The conclusion? None so far. Just “so it goes” – as Kurt Vonnegut kept repeating. Fortunately I was born in times when it’s probably not a blasphemy to quote him in this context…