Which countries allow private strips / operating from your own land, and how hard is it to organise (and airfields for sale)

EPKG 147 hectares, EUR 14,3M.

In 1989 a MiG-23 took off from this field. After 30s from takeoff the pilot ejected. Plane continued flying until crashing in Belgium.

A long hard runway so close to a quiet beach, that’s where we will build our EuroGA fly-in resort

Unless Peter or Emir know a better place in Croatia ;)

This place was for sale a few years ago for 1m Euro, reputedly owned by a UK pilot who crashed flying back from here to the UK, presumably abandoned afterwards

Cortijo Grande 37°08’07.2"N 1°56’08.5"W

Near Mojacar Spain

I created a test ZZZZ entry for that one – here

Took me a while to find it. An interesting exercise for usability on the Airports site.

It must be this abandoned airfield near Cortijo Grande, which was used for this Indiana Jones movie. There are youtube videos of it; one is a guy exploring it

By the crash, do you mean this one? That one, a Partenavia, didn’t depart Spain. Very strange crash; nothing ever found. Happened in 1981, and the airfield does look like it’s been abandoned for decades. So it looks like the family or whoever developed that airfield crashed in that plane.

I think this is like so many projects in Spain. Inland, much of it is a desert, with limited potential for getting people with significant €€€ to live there. Murcia Air Park, anyone?

I tried to buy a small airfield a few years ago. I couldn’t afford it personally, but through work buying commercial storage (a hangar, with bonus runway) was possible. I naïvely thought it would be a case of making an offer then paying lawyers to sort out the conveyancing.

The land was in 4 parts: a big house, a gatehouse, farmland, forestry. The airfield was part of the farmland (barns and very well cut grass).

• Problem 1: the package was being sold by two brothers, who couldn’t agree who got what, or what it was worth.

• Problem 2: a lot of interest and time wasters from property developers – the estate agent was sick of walking over the same few fields over and over again. There had been lots of offers, but all subject to planning permission.

• Problem 3: it was advertised as an active airfield, but one of the brothers was staying in his house and didn’t want planes flying over it.

• Problem 4: the estate agent was very anti-GA. His exact words were “we’ll clear out the sh*tty little hobby flyers in no time.”

• Problem 5: the estate agent had his own agenda – I’m reasonably certain he never passed my offer on to the sellers (3/4 of asking price, but no requirement for planning permission)

• Problem 6: difficulty borrowing larger sums. Bank manager panicked (above his pay grade?), B2B lending was max £1M, and brokers sounded suspicious.

• Problem 7: what to do with the non-airfield land? It was only viable with EU subsidies, but what happens post-Brexit?

All this took many hours of phonecalls, emails, general hassle, and eventually I gave up.

According to the local newspaper, the airfield is being closed to make way for building one luxury home. The council had recommended keeping it open as it was a source of employment for the local area: a groundsman and a few working in the based maintenance shop, not counting those employed by the contract farmer. Reading between the lines, the property developer had stirred up the local population to get them to complain en masse about aircraft noise, because there had been no previous complaints to the council or aviation authority.

quatrelle wrote:

This place was for sale a few years ago for 1m Euro, reputedly owned by a UK pilot who crashed flying back from here to the UK, presumably abandoned afterwards

OMG, this place has an extremely illustrious and sad history. I don’t recall all the details, but it was built as part of a luxury development nearby. Several rounds of bankruptcies and all sort of legal wranglings later it was abandoned. Last time I was there ( 15 years go ??) the development was half-built (a friend had a villa there) and the runway was unusable, potholed and strewn with trash, the little terminal building vandalized. For a while part of it was used as a runway for RC model flying. Really sad, as the location would have been great for some nice parts of southern Spain.

Seems like the holy graal. Why cant someone make a a private airstrip with real estate work in Europe? I see no real reason why it should be such a insurmountable thing.

AdamFrisch wrote:

Why cant someone make a a private airstrip with real estate work in Europe?

Population density.

This is the root cause of the problem. More people means higher land prices, more planning issues and more Nimby’s.
The only places there are “air parks” in Europe are where there are low population densities.

Regards, SD..

Lots of previous threads on this. You need money, and most people who have significant money want to live somewhere nice. Even keen pilots. Not in the middle of nowhere, where it is probably +45C in the summer. They certainly don’t want to live next to a runway (unless nobody else uses it ). There is nowadays little money in Spain (see many posts by Spanish pilots; GA has almost collapsed and it is mostly UL) so it would have to come from outside, and you need a great location to make that work.

It looks like the owner of that Spanish site was the owner of the Partenavia which crashed off Guernsey – see the ASN link I posted. That was 1981 which puts a timeframe on how long the place may have been abandoned. But it’s quite likely that getting a planning permission to rebuild that place would be easy. What would it get you? Perhaps recovering the runway, assuming it was not built by a complete cowboy, would save a few hundred k over building a fresh one. The buildings??

172driver wrote:

OMG, this place has an extremely illustrious and sad history. I don’t recall all the details, but it was built as part of a luxury development nearby

I was told that the golf course and villas and runway were all built by someone from the US called Polanski, they sold the properties without selling the land that they sat on and this was the start of the problems, there were signs everywhere warning everyone against buying anything.

Other than that it would have been a good opportunity to build a number of villas with hangers and a runway and still could be if you were a local and could handle the Spanish bureaucracy.