Local flight school activities are thriving, people are getting interested, so my personal assessment is German GA is pretty strong, despite lots of idiots trying to denounce it.
In the densest populated area of the world, where it takes max 1/2 hour to fly/drive to any EASA approved “organization” whether training or maintenance, and where people actually prefer “organizations”, you don’t need to be a genius to understand that this system fits well in Germany. One could almost believe it is tailor made for the German demographic.. 
Meanwhile, GA is dying a slow death do to lack of a simple and straightforward system that has proven to work better than anything else in the good old USA. A system which most of almost had pre-JAR/EASA and GA was blooming.
LeSving wrote:
Meanwhile, GA is dying a slow death do to lack of a simple and straightforward system that has proven to work better than anything else in the good old USA. A system which most of almost had pre-JAR/EASA and GA was blooming.
I’m not sure EASA is the main reason of GA dying in Europe. I would say that lack of money and interest as well as changing way of life are the main reasons. E.g. in Croatia on average 1-1.5 hour flight I spend almost the same amount on fuel as for landing fees. And EASA doesn’t have anything with that. Reducing number of airports with immigration across the Europe limited my choices of destinations to ports of entry – usually more expensive airports. Again, nothing to do with EASA.
I’m really interested to learn how exactly EASA is reducing GA. I don’t say that flying in USA is not easier (I almost don’t have any experience with it and I only can repeat what others, who have it, say about it) but I don’t understand what EASA could do for GA in Europe to soar. BTW GA declines in USA as well.
Emir wrote:
Bumping this old thread with GA data for Sweden https://www.transportstyrelsen.se/flygtid – decline of flight hours of some 17% across 8 years (2010-2017).PDF of above
It will be interesting when the 2018 numbers are released, there were a record high number of hours flown due to the extreme draught and forest fires nation wide (via the equivalence to the civial air patrol in the US, called FFK in Sweden). This will probably impact the stats.
There are many loners now in GA, a result of many factors. Not only meaning individual pilots but also clubs/organisations/syndicates not seeing the bigger picture and instead kicking each other. It’s easier to join up online than in the real world, as this forum shows.
I can observe it locally. There used to be a thriving club scene, hundreds of members paying annual dues to share the fixed costs of planes ranging from simple trainers to multis like C414 etc. Then “Club politics”, not updating the planes to a modern standard, abstract fees and minimum flight hours paid in avance etc.. led to members going elsewhere, chartering privately.
Now, what’s left are a few decrepit 2 and 4 seaters and a broke club. There are a couple of much more modern airplanes available hassle free from non club outfits (no annual “work days” or cleaning events like in clubs, no stupid bowing to the club president) but they don’t see much flying, so the hourly prices are high.
Subsequently light GA is not a big factor for the airport anymore so they raise their fees. E.g.: Landing a sub 2T plane costs roughly 50€. That’s ok for me if I visit another field, but when you pay 7000€ parking fee per year one daily landing at the homebase should be free. Imagine doing touch and goes at 50€ each.
Hangar space is based on weight, instead of square footage/volume, leading to an abundance of smaller less capable planes parked in the dry while the good stuff is rotting outside. Instead of getting together an interest group, talking to the airport about intelligent controlling by using landing fees (high fees on sundays to avoid training flights, low fees on tuesday morning…) everybody is complaining by themselves instead of achieving something together.
The biggest factor is money. The only way to change that is to increase flying by making it more affordable, with intelligent legislation that makes sense for safety and getting rid of useless paperwork exercises that cost massive amounts which trickle down into the cost of flying.
Without a serious, professionally set up pan european GA lobbying group I don’t think it will be getting better at all! EuroGA is a good start towards that ;).
I think it is impossible to establish a “club” (or whatever you call the structure) which suits everyone.
We did a bit of it here, for example. Formal club structures tend to lead to authoritarian characters emerging and then a lot of people leave, and obviously those with most money are usually those with the most options, so they leave first, so you quickly lose the most active people. Then you get a drive to the bottom, and a collapse to a situation where the remaining people argue about who will pay for the teabags.
And because “security of tenure” (having a hangar space, having an airfield to fly from, etc) is so vital in GA, and often so precarious, those with money tend to act fast to safeguard their position. Unfortunately there are too few of them about; the bulk of GA is scraping out the bottom of the barrel. Well, you get some obviously wealthy setups… go to Lausanne for example.
If pilots would organise themselves in numbers and stuck their hands in their pockets just a little, they could secure many threatened airfields. In most places, and especially the UK, most pilots want to freeload from others, constantly posting about boycotting Airfield X because it charges more than £10, and then they moan when it closes, or when it “does a Biggin Hill” which has just almost doubled its pricing, made possible by the bizjet traffic.
I’m really interested to learn how exactly EASA is reducing GA
The EASA way works (in some sense) only where the density is high enough to offset the cost. It doesn’t scale when the density decreases. The only way to make it scalable is to get rid of every single bit of “organisation” in the operational aspects.
The utility value in private GA (as opposed to taking an airline or train or whatever) lies in it’s ability to operate outside of the dense commercial grid of transportation and infrastructure. Yet, the EASA way of doing things requires a dense commercial grid of transportation and infrastructure.
Of course there are other factors as well, but they tend more to be cultural rather than technical.
Peter wrote:
Formal club structures tend to lead to authoritarian characters emerging and then a lot of people leave, and obviously those with most money are usually those with the most options, so they leave first, so you quickly lose the most active people. Then you get a drive to the bottom, and a collapse to a situation where the remaining people argue about who will pay for the teabags.
That’s what you always say, but it doesn’t work like that everwhere. It doesn’t work like that in Sweden, for example. It might be a question of national culture, since e.g. Sweden has a long and strong tradition of this kind of organisation in every aspect of society, with roots at least 150 years back.
That’s why I said “tend to”
Europe is a collection of countries, with often very different cultures. This is also evident from the diversity of views on EuroGA.
Emir wrote:
I’m not sure EASA is the main reason of GA dying in Europe.
It initially was a huge roadblock during the first years where the leadership there obviously were either totally oblivious to the needs of GA or had a true ambition to exterminate it. However, with the appointment of Patrick Ky, that has changed, even though the improvements are coming slowly.
What I had to find out over the years is that EASA served several national CAA’s as the comfortable big brother on which they blamed just about every brainfart they imposed on GA on, because it was out of reach and “untouchable” people usually believed it. But in many such cases, the actual culprits were bad guys in the actual CAA’s who used EASA’s reputation for their own devices. Not unlike some Brits who still belive the EU is responsible for many grievances which were actually imposed by various governments and as unpopular decisions were blamed onto the EU. Recently I have seen EASA being the driving force behind stopping gold plating by national CAA’s even though they do not always succeed rather than the baddie who imposes unreasonable regulation. But it will take a while still until most of the failings of the first generation EASA leadership is corrected and some renitent CAA’s forced into submission.
As for GA dying, there are many reasons. Populist politicians who wish to exterminate anything to do with fossil fuels, green radicals, overpopulation and increasing lack of tolerance towards others, increasing frustration in large parts of the population which are always on the outlook for soft targets to vent their spleens on, but even those are not really the critical mass: even though they do manage to kill the occasional airport, the biggest driver for the decline of GA is cost and time avialability.
Cost because many people today need their money to pay for ever increasing rent and living costs so they can not afford expensive hobbies. But even that is the small part, the big killer is Time. People today work more than ever, they are in fixed schedules and have to declare their vaccations years before, they are working from 7 to 7 every day and many take 2nd jobs on their days off to make ends meet. Then there is a lot of “easier” past times which many people take to today, from spending their time in front of their smartphones or wasting money in clubs or elsewhere. Those with families quite often stop doing anything else the moment their first kids are born because they become totally overwhelmed with the time required to bring up a kid. That is why e.g. inthe US you see a very prominent scheme where people make their PPL with 25 and then start flying at 65 once they are retired and the kids have flown from home.
In short, those people whom I see as successful GA pilots today are self-employed or in a situation where they can make their own schedule and have an income beyond 150k Euros p.a. and many are childless and single. Most of the others can not afford to fly both in terms of money and time.
martin-esmi wrote:
It will be interesting when the 2018 numbers are released, there were a record high number of hours flown2017 had the shittiest summer of the century and 2018 the nicest, including a lot of forrest fire watch all over the country. We must be careful to look at long term trends and not only the very sharp year-over-year contrast.
