8) Restauraunt, if any
9) Ground transport (the US solution is often for the rental car company to figure out how to get you the car from a local non-airport office)
I am not their accountant so have no idea but it is a great airfield. Grass and hard runways and good facilities.
I assume mostly hangarage and the cafe with a little from fuel and landing fees.
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In Germany most airports recieve some kind of public funding. This can sometimes result in ridiculous pet projects of local politicans creating “international” airports with top-notch facilities were basically nothing happens all day, e.g. Kassel-Calden EDVK, despite major international airports already existing within about 100 km driving distance (in EDVKs case that would be Hannover EDDH and Frankfurt EDDF, and even the much closer Paderborn/Lippstadt EDLP is more frequented)
My home base of Leer-Papenburg EDWF is mainly owned and operated by the local district (Landkreis) and towns (namesake cities Leer and Papenburg). It helps that it sees a lot of use by the Papenburger Meyer-Werft shipyard famous for its cruise ships. My flying club also is part of the owners group (Gesellschafter).
A lot of local airports/aerodromes are run and funded this way in Germany. Some are even run entirely by flying clubs.
EDIT: And answering your original post, my field doesn’t have much in the way of commercial property rental income. There’s a restaurant, a flying school and some very minor offices. That’s it. And AVGAS is famously cheap at our field, so that can’t be much of an income either. I don’t know about their balance sheet unfortunately.
MedEwok wrote:
In Germany most airports recieve some kind of public funding
No public funding in Norway, except in some few specific cases where a local administration partly or fully actually owns and runs the airport. But we have Avinor that owns and runs most public airports. Parking is free there for private GA. It’s up to private initiative to set up hangars and any other utilities needed on top of what is already there. Yearly fee to use them all (except ENGM) and their services is about €5-600, and a private pilot is treated as any other pilot.
We also have lots of smaller private, but public available, GA airports. They are simple stuff. A strip and a hangar or two, and that’s it really, with a few exceptions.
If you are the “city guy” in need to be able to move around without getting mud on your shoes, or water in your hair, then Avinor is your only choice. If you are more of a “outdoor guy” with mountain hiking boots and a wind breaker, then a whole new additional world opens up.
Except for making the runway, what cost are there? Fuel pays for itself, hangars pay for themselves and so on.
The major cost is staff, and ATC an a fire crew cost more than anything else. But the fire crew can be multi-purpose e.g. fuel, general maintenance, moving planes out of hangars. Actual fires are extremely rare and in one presentation I went to a UK government minister said that not a single life was saved by an on-airport fire crew in GA since WW2. I know this is not true for some other countries e.g. a couple of instances in Croatia.
I don’t understand why you need all that “stuff” on a GA airport. You only need that for commercial airline traffic.
The airport I learned to fly at and was based at for a few years was profitable.
Houston Gulf Airport in Houston, Texas. It was privately owned, but public use, and received zero subsidies at any level. It would have been “Peter approved” as it had 5,000 feet of asphalt runway, lighting, and an instrument approach (only non-precision, but if it were still around today it would probably have an LPV). It did not charge landing fees. All the money was made by hangar rent, tiedown rent, fuel sales, and business rent. All the businesses and organisations on the airfield were aviation businesses: a very small flight school, a flying club and a two man maintenance outfit and a two man avionics shop. Most of the hangarage was T-hangars, and one rule was to be able to rent hangar space you had to keep a plane in there and it had to be flying (although a couple of exceptions were made, for instance for the old Howard that was undergoing a serious restoration). Unfortunately there was no restaurant or café or rental car place, but a local firm was quite happy to drop off and pick up rental cars from the airport.
Most of the traffic was piston singles, but there was some jet traffic including one Lear based at the airfield.
There were usually only four people working directly for the airport, the guy who held the lease, his better half who was the manager (the two of them did the management), and two line guys who were typically college-aged people looking to make a bit of extra money, occasionally they’d have a third during the busiest time of the year. They had a regular freelance groundkeeper type guy who would come in from time to time and do various maintenance and grounds work such as cutting the grass.
Unfortunately it was owned by the Bin Laden family and the press descended on them after 9/11 (Shock horror, Bin Laden family owns an airport!!111) so they very quickly sold the airport to a housing developer and it’s gone now.
alioth wrote:
it was owned by the Bin Laden family and the press descended on them after 9/11
Groan. I recall that that family is about as numerous as the inhabitant figures of a minor city… that one moron really got the whole family in discredit.
I recall that in the times of German terrorism there was one called Müller. Good thing they did not force anyone called like that to sell their businesses after that wayward “relative” comitted her crimes.
Anyway: on the topic: Most airfields in Switzerland are club owned and they live of a combination of membership fees (anyone based there needs to pay the sometimes hefty yearly fees), landing fees, hangarage and commercial properties such as maintenance, restaurants and sometimes other stuff too. Most of them have few if any commercial rental spaces outside the direct aviation related businesses. I reckon they can survive as their fees are quite high by other standards.
One grass airfield I know charges it’s members CHF 500 per annum (all based pilots) and has landing fees in the region of 30-40 chf, plus sells fuel and has a lot of hangar space with waiting list which rent for 400-600 chf per month and place (common hangar, partially with elevators). I would say they are quite healty.
Silvaire wrote:
Somebody mentioned a while ago that they believed the ‘firefighting thing’ is an ICAO requirement, and I managed to restrain myself from saying that I’ve never landed at an airport with dedicated firefighting equipment Why can’t the same fire fighters and equipment that respond to any other fire (non-airport structure fires, car fires etc) in the area respond to airport fires equally effectively?
It is an ICAO thing as far as the fire fighting category is concerned. Whether or not it is required depends on the type of operation. Commercial operators and public transport are only allowed to operate from and to fields which have the fire fighting category that matches their aircraft size. Private operators do not require it. Maybe EASA part NCO (non commercial complex) but I don’t know.
And yes, using the fire brigade of the nearest town can be an option if the airfield does not have enough commercial traffic to warrant their own fire truck and personnel. I have operated from fields which do it this way. The firefighters need to be at the airfield (their home base is not enough) whenever commercial aircraft are operated there. Since the smaller town fire brigades are often run by volunteers who do it besides a normal day job, dispatching them to the airfield is usually difficult to organise and expensive.
Also it is very handy to have “proper people” moving planes around. Letting owners to do it often results in minor damage for which nobody takes responsibility but which can be very expensive. A sad comment on human nature but sadly true in so many places. So having the fire crew doing that, fuelling, etc, is efficient.
Self service pumps would solve a part of that but the ones I have come across have been a total disaster e.g. French ones working only with the TOTAL card, AIR BP ones working only with the AIR BP card and having local language menus despite identifying the card as an English one, etc. Only somebody trying to protect a monopoly at the cost of shafting foreign visitors, or a moron, would design and deploy such a limited product.
