@ C210 Flyer
My limitations are a home airport that is Day-VFR only with a MEA that is ridiculously high 4000’ with no contact approaches allowed. My alternate has a 400Euro landing fee that is close by.
Could you fly an IAP at Budapest and then fly below say a 1500 ft ceiling to your base? That would at least allow you to beat the 4000’ MEA.
I’d be happy if there was an airfield like LHTL near where I live, my next alternative for a concrete runway with customs is 80 NM away, another is closer but reachable by in between 50 and 120 minutes by car as the way there is over a very busy part of the motorway system. But that one is VFR only as well.
Other than that, I can only agree to what you say, with maybe the exception that Germany is quite good particularly VFR. Airspaces are not excessive, lots of free flying space between the reserved airspaces and pretty decent prices on the smaller airports or airfields. There are other places like EDMA which have good infrastructure and are decently priced. Yes, Munich is a well known case and very unfortunate, even though it was more a political thing than airlines being involved, frankly with the number of passengers they’d “loose” they simply don’t care about GA as long as GA gets out of their way.
Im surprised that the railroads allowed road development for cars 80 yrs ago cause they didnt want competition. Maybe cause they were mostly state run affairs.
There are political parties who want just that, tax individual traffic (cars as well as planes) into obliviation and force you on the train. The same gang often enough would happily do away with airlines as well btw, the Cho Cho is quite enough for them. Thankfully, they are still a (vocal) minority though and in Germany especcially, where the car is a very well established means of transport, they’d bite on something even tougher than Angela Merkel when it comes to restricting car movement.
I’d think in Europe, you need to know where to go and what to do in order to get some decent flying. You’ve discovered Augsburg, there are other similar destinations. From Budapest, I’d think you’d find that places like Belgrade or the Croatian Adria airports are very nice destinations, equally Slovenian airports are nice and not very expensive. Austria is good as well, Graz, Klagenfurt, Salzburg (outside weekends) and Innsbruck are good places with IFR infrastructure and customs. I actually think that the former Yugoslavia is absolutely great for flying, cheap fuel, good infrastructure and not far from you.
Hi Shorrick,
That plus personal ownership of anything was discouraged in Eastern Europe as it was viewed as a capitalistic trait. One could most certainly not own a plane!
That is still the attitude in many areas of Europe even today. Only it is no longer called communism but, what it was even then, envy. And envy is not rational, most people don’t even know what it is they are envious of, but the idea alone that one guy can do something more than them, even if they don’t even desire it, sometimes triggers this ugly reflex.
(In my hometown dialect, there was a very characteristic expression for this, translated in English it would mean “amazing that he’s allowed to do that???”. This gives you the general attitude very omnipresent in Switzerland, even though I have come across it in Germany as well. What is not explicitly allowed is forbidden, personal freedom is regarded as something everyone wants but nobody really has, at least not in their direct societies. If you want to test it, try hanging out your washing on Sunday in the catholic cantons or worse, on good friday in a reformed one.)
QuoteIn my hometown dialect, there was a very characteristic expression for this, translated in English it would mean “amazing that he’s allowed to do that???”.
If you could share the original phrase, I’d have something to discuss over lunch tomorrow with my Bernese colleagues. 
in Bavarian dialect the saying goes : Derf der des ?? - Der derf des!! - Daß der des derf !!
Translated : Is he entitled to do this - He is !! - Unbelievable, he is ??!!
This was posted on another thread today, after a gear collapse (in a Mooney)
They appear to be sufficiently traumatized (their words, not mine) about this relatively trivial event that they are in dire straits on how to continue flying, to me it appears the have totally lost confidence in the airplanes they might want to buy, and they have even decided not to repair theirs as they never want to fly it again after this. Totally inexplicable to me but that is what even small events can trigger.
I wonder to what extent these events (which are not uncommon) are linked to not having trustworthy maintenance options.
I know of a TB20 owner who got sufficiently p1ssed off with various landing gear issues for them to become a significant factor in selling the plane. But, to me, it is obvious that the problem was not having anybody around who have any intelligent troubleshooting capability. The TB2x gear system is really very simple, and even if you change everything that might possibly cause a problem it is still “only” about 2k (basically, the gear pump and the pressure switch; everything else is trivial to test).
