European touring patterns

Peter wrote:

What can one generalise mostly?

From my 40 years of experience in the GA world I conclude the following: the largest group of pilots in GA enjoys the flying part, in fact more than the “going-to-places” part. Most of these do their flying alone or with a buddy. You don’t have to sit hours in the cabin if you only want to enjoy the art of flying. And then 10 hours per year is perfectly fine for them.

Then there is a group of pilots who own a plane and just enjoy owning that plane. Most of them don’t go to places, but maybe to fly-ins and so on.

Then there is a small group of pilots that have so much money that they go directly to big engined-whatsoever, and most of them have no interest whatsoever in fly-ins or club activities or an internet forum. They just do.

And there is another quite small group of pilots who enjoy flying AND go to places. And who look around in the community to find others who do the same. And in fact it’s the smallest fraction of pilots doing this. There is A LOT of self-education involved if you want to go to places by plane. You don’t just fly to another country. You ought to know all there is to know about local regulations prior to your flight. There are a lot of uncertainties and labor. And huge cost traps. And frustration. And then there is weather. All this pays off only for very few.

Just to give an example: there are most attractive flying destinations south of the alps. But crossing the alps on a sunny afternoon is often not possible with typical GA planes, or only doable with lots of experience and the attitude to shy away if things go bad. This includes, well, time, costs, and the possibility that you don’t fly home on a given date.

But all of us pilots are important to be able to fly like it is possible today. If there’s a small airfield somewhere near my destination where I can stay for a fraction of costs AND at the same time meet people with the same passion, that’s where I go. If they were not there, flying could be a lot more costly.

but I don’t think it’s as straightforward as he makes out

Correct. It seems to me that most threads about clubs, homebuilts, ICAO, touring, and a few other subjects instantly get a certain “Putinesce” flavor on them were the colours are limited to black and white.

Yes AstonFly, they stopped their rental business early this year

@Ibra am I right in thinking you used to rent from Air et Compagne/ Astonfly. I used to also but I didn’t know they had stopped renting other than the school. That’s interesting. It’s been a few years now, when I started with IAF and later became a member of Iroise club I found Brest easier to get to than Toussus. The president of the Iroise club is CPL SEIR MEIR day job is instructor or flies the parachute launch plane SET at another club. Another member of the committee is in aircraft maintenance. Getting a DA40 or DA42 for the week is easy minimum flight time 2hrs a day, but they are usually quite relaxed about that.
LFFK club is small now. We used to have 3 aircraft and going away for the week in the larger engined aircraft or the Jodel was not a problem.
With only the one certified aircraft now it is more difficult to go away for the week as at weekends it tends to be booked for the school. But it is not impossible. I am not including the availability of the club’s ULM which is no real problem. We also have agreements with other clubs and if our aircraft is not available for a week or 2 away we can usually book one of theirs.
As Airborne has written the presidents of both clubs only have limited power as all major decisions, such as which planes we buy, are only made with the majority approval of the members.

I think the proper club vs business question does make a material difference to what sort of usage terms you’re likely to see.

At a proper club, the main driving force is ‘fair’ availability for members. That definition of fair is presumably the subject of much debate and different policies depending on the wishes of the membership as a whole and other factors such as how many hours each aircraft needs to fly a year in order to meet its cost/revenue projections.

In a business (most UK ‘clubs’) there is one single driving force which is much more black and white and not open to different definitions – maximising the hours flown to maximise the revenue. Short bookings and lots of them is what maximises hours flown, particularly when the weather is good. This is increasingly the case when training is a big part of the business. At the ‘club’ I did my PPL at, their PA28s can easily be flying 5-6 hours a day each during periods of good weather – and there’s just no way you’ll see those sort of hours if you let a ‘member’ (customer) take one of them away for a week. Then you also lose out on the revenue for selling the instructor’s services, and have a irritated instructor on your books who hasn’t got any work that week.

@Peter has a point, but I don’t think it’s as straightforward as he makes out. It all depends on how much of a hard-nosed business attitude that a real club finds itself having to adopt in order to make the aircraft pay for themselves. If a club has healthy finances and hasn’t borrowed heavily to acquire the aircraft in the first place then it will have a lot more leeway than if it’s relying on significant hire revenue to service debt.

What I find interesting is how much more difficult the situation is here compared with the clubs I was a member of in the US, which universally allowed multi-day trips with a 2 or 3 hour per diem minimum. Every club I was a member of had its bread and butter training aircraft (C172s mostly, but sometimes BE23s, PA28s, or even Alarus) and then something more complex/expensive/weird like an AA-5B, the lone Piper in a Cessna fleet, or an RG version that most people weren’t checked out in. I always got checked out in whatever that was, because it was mostly available. And I would fly weekend trips 3-4 hrs away to make the per diem worth it. Here I haven’t found anything like this.

Back to the topic, the place in Toussus I used to rent for IFR international trips (after I moved from UK to France and sold my shared aircraft) has now stopped private rental: they wanted to concentrate on their CPL/ATPL, they had a nice fleet of C172S, SR22, DA42 and all aircraft were max 10 years old and well equipped, they were pricey but rental terms were flexible (I could fly aircraft at 22pm on Friday and bring it back at 22pm on Sunday), I think at the end of the day, it’s offer & demand?

Peter wrote:

The club president (of a club formed as a “charitable operation”, a “sporting body”, or whatever it is called to get tax concessions) has the same “interest” in a plane not getting wrecked as the owner of a club formed as a limited company.

Indeed. The difference is that in a democratic association, the members have the final say. (They also have a shared interest in not getting planes wrecked or underutilised.) They can simply overrule the club president or depose him/her. If they have a customer relationship they can not. They can of course vote with their feet, but that in itself doesn’t force a change and also means that they have to give up something unless there is a convenient and better alternative which makes it a step many would not be prepared to take.

My “bait” comment refererred to this having been discussed many times and it just goes off on a tangent, with implied assertions that in some places money grows on trees. But money doesn’t grow on trees anywhere.

Well, it only does if someone wants to turn the discussion in that direction. I don’t.