But GA mixes with airline traffic OK in the USA, so what exactly is being done differently?
To me knowledge, there are essentially two important differences.
1. Almost all airports in the US get some fedral funding. A requirement of that funding is that the airport is open to all traffic. Perhaps the grant is based on the number of movement. I can’t remember exactly, but I’m pretty sure this federal funding and the basis for it and/or the conditiosn that comes with it, is the reason for open access of so many airports. If everyone has the same requirements, then the airlines can’t demand the removal of GA because they know that’s not possible.
2. ATC in the USA is employed by the FAA, not the airport. Their boss is somebody in the FAA, and their salary is based on the amount of traffic that the handle. While in Europe, generally airport ATC is employed by the airport. Their boss is the airport boss, and they are probably paid by the ontime record that they faciliate.
dublinpilot wrote:
ATC in the USA is employed by the FAA, not the airport. Their boss is somebody in the FAA, and their salary is based on the amount of traffic that the handle.
This is a very good and relevant point. I believe both the FAA airport funding and (indirectly) FAA controllers are financially motivated to increase their numbers: in the case of ATC, controller pay is dependent on the grade of the airport on some scale related to traffic volume, so they want to maintain the airport at that level. I have been cheerfully thanked by ATC for flying on a given day to maintain the numbers, on ground frequency after I’d finished for the day
dublinpilot wrote:
While in Europe, generally airport ATC is employed by the airport. Their boss is the airport boss, and they are probably paid by the ontime record that they faciliate.
Define “Europe” 
This is certainly not the case in Norway. The ATC is done by Avinor, which is a 100% state owned company. They even serve the Air Force (and the other way around many places). Avinor also own most of the commercial airports for scheduled traffic. It’s only on the largest airports they make profit (Bergen, Trondheim, Oslo and a couple more maybe). This profit is used to finance all the smaller airports. Anyone can build an airport, and try to make some money out of it, but they cannot do this without ATC from Avinor.
This means that maybe 70-80% of the commercial airports in Norway are literally loss projects from a strict commercial point of view. No private operator would do it like this. To keep the other airports going, political decisions has to be made. It is a political choice. You have to decide that this is the way you want it, even though it cost money. Still, it doesn’t cost more than what the handful of the larger airports makes in profit (large airports makes an insane amount of money). Avinor is 100% self financed.
For commercial traffic, a manned tower is needed in Norway. That is where the remote towers come in. 5 airports are now being changed to remote towers, and 10 more until 2020. Later on, I think every single airport will have remote towers. Those smaller airports have maybe 2-6 flights per day, and with a remote tower, one single person can operate several airports. One of the benefits will be that they can stay open 24/7, because there will always be ATC personnel in the Remote Tower Center (RTC, yet another acronym to remember ) The first RTC is in Bodø, and one of the first “remote” airports will be Røros. According to Avinor, Røros will be all nice and smooth, and open 24/7, but I won’t believe that before it happens and I land at Røros at 00:00 on Sunday morning
Avinor is one thing. In general GA, particularly recreational GA, shy away from Avinor airports if there are other alternatives. The pricing mechanisms they have is very unbeneficial for small GA vs commercial flights. Even though the prices (take off charges) are not outrageous in any way, they are too high. There are too much fuzz with Avinor airports: restrictive opening hours (which hopefully soon will a thing of the past), security and take off charges. Parking is free though. Most of recreational GA live on private fields around the country.
News lately that HIAL, the QUANGO operating Scottish airports in the north, (but not Aberdeen) is considering remote control towers, with all ATC at one centre. The Controllers union is unhappy.
(Dundee, Islay, Tiree, Barra, Benbecula, Stornoway, Inverness, Wick, Kirkwall, and Sumburgh.)
dublinpilot wrote:
If I suddenly found myself in charge of a regional airport that was losing money, and the future of my job, and the prospects of a bonus were dependent on turning it around, I’m sure that GA would be low on my priorities.
That is already the starting point why European airports are often very screwed up indeed. Infrastructure is not primarily there to make a profit, it is there to provide service. How would you e.g. want a road to make a profit? Still you need them, otherwise people would have to resort to walking. Same thing for airports imho.
The bit about GA not paying the bills is another one where those managers often delude themselfs badly. And then, instead of setting their bets on many customers who contribute few, they set on one big airline who then become the de facto operator of the airport and dictate their terms. Very unhealthy, particularly if the airline then drops the airport…
Say you got an average of 100 ga movements per day who pay a landing fee of 15 Euros each, that is 1500 Euros per day or 45k per month.
Then you get an airline who will operate a daily flight with a jet and pais 2000 per day. Wow go the bean counters and go ahead, buy the infrastructure, build a terminal, extend the runway e.t.c. to get what? 60k per month for one operation.
Consequently, they rise landing fees for GA to 50 Euros (not because GA costs more but because their shiny new Airline facilities need more than one airline to be profitable but there is only that one. So instead of 45 k per month of GA they make only 15’000 because 2/3rds of the GA movements will go elsewhere or pack up.
Apart, they had 100 airplanes parked in the hangar who pay maybe 200 Euros per month, so another 20k per month. With the higher landing fees and other restrictions, maybe half of them leave. If you want to accelerate that process, increase the rent to 300 Euros as GA has to “pay their share” for the terminal e.t.c.
Consequently, GA activity all but ceases, makes maybe 10k per month. The managers might even still think they are fine, after all, the total turn over out of landing fees and hangar rent is still higher than before? So GA does not pay for itself and is therefore deemed redundant.
And then, the airline folds or decides, the destination is not profitable and leaves.
But the shiny new terminal still needs to be paid for and as GA has even less income, the whole airport is deemed unprofitable and closed or, as an inbetween, fees are again risen to compensate for the less income.
Some airports did reckognize their mistake and reverse the increased GA cost and got their traffic back, others did not and eventually end up as a housing estate. Others soldier on with public money and are a under public attacks all the time.
Over simplified, sure. Add to the above the profit from the restaurants, maintenance areas e.t.c. who catered for the lively GA airport and either left or gave way to expensive franchises who took over the terminal. Add to that the increased cost in personell (you need security for the airliner, 4-5 people on constant payroll, e.t.c.) and you get the idea.
Had they instead left GA in peace and operated the airline part of the airport as a separate profit center, they could have ended up like some airports who did and are quite happy. The big mistake in this whole misery is alway the same, trying to recover costs which do not concern GA by rising GA fees into the unrealistic and/or putting the whole airport at the grace of one or two carriers rather than a whole lot of GA.
It can work differenty. GA can actually profit from airlines being present at the airport, as they attract additional businesses such as rental car agencies e.t.c, as they give the airport a much more secure public acceptance and lessen the risk of them being turned into housing estates on a whim. They also usually get the airport to get an instrument approach. The problem is usually that the airlines and the airport operators do not consider that GA itself, if left to operate in a proper and fair way, will contribute its fair share to the total income of the airport maybe not as significant as a single airline will but with much less risk and much less cost involved too.
I can see this often, not only on large airports but there as well. Those airports who price out GA and who set all their horses on airline traffic miss out on the if small but still present income from GA, they miss out on a lot of public support because of their treatment of GA and they often enough have long idle phases where nothing at all happens, therefore exposing their lies about capacity problems caused by GA (which never really existed).
One possible answer to all this is that airports should be required by law to allow all traffic at fair conditions or else they do not get any infrastructure money whatsoever, like what the FAA does. Also, it is a very good idea to keep GA and Airline infrastructure either separate or if joined then with clear pretext of cost, not that GA gets unfairly burdened with cost they do not cause. Thirdly, airport operators and owners need to understand that betting on single or a very few airline customers over their existing faithful userbase means that that existing base will almost certainly be lost for good and they will be at the mercy of those carriers, no matter what.
Peter wrote:
according to another post, the revenue from that one service exceeds the total piston GA revenue.
That would surprise me greatly. The service was one tiny LET 410 per day – not something like a B737 or even an ATR, and it would have a lot more costs than a typical GA single (GA single would have nearly zero direct cost to EGBJ, no extra staff needed, but that one airline service would take staff off to run the security scan, direct people onto the plane etc). The fare CityWing charged wasn’t sufficient for the airport to be making a huge amount of money off it.
As for the ILS, there are plenty of bizjets using EGBJ. I can’t imagine the airport putting the ILS in just for that one LET 410 per day.
@Mooney_Driver, that is one detailed, but I think entirely accurate, description. The main issue in my mind is that current management motivations do not seem to be financial, instead being driven by a model that in management’s imagination will bring wealthy and glamour… miraculously doing so without the need for wealth being based on prosaic factors like work, maximizing the scale of the business, or increasing the combined cash flow of the activity.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
Say you got an average of 100 ga movements per day who pay a landing fee of 15 Euros each, that is 1500 Euros per day or 45k per month.
I don’t think that’s realist for most regional airports. If the airport is open for 10 hours a day, that’s one paying ga movement every 6 minutes. So that’s a take off or landing every 3 minutes (only the landings pay!), all day long, every day, 7 days a week.
Most busy GA airport are busy with circuit traffic, most of which is from schools which have flat fee arrangements. Most GA only flies when the weather is nice, so many days with little or no activity. During the winter there can be days with no movements at all. Certain days of the week, will be much quieter.
Realistically, I can’t imagine any regional airport, able to generate 1 movement every 3 minutes, all day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
Wow go the bean counters and go ahead, buy the infrastructure, build a terminal, extend the runway e.t.c.
The rest of your scenario I can relate to.
dublinpilot wrote:
Most GA only flies when the weather is nice, so many days with little or no activity
But hangar rents are paid whatever the weather.
The airport I learned at was privately owned, got no government subsidy of any sort (in fact, it paid handsome property taxes to the town it was in), charged no landing fees but was profitable. They made their money solely from hangar rent and fuel sales. Only aviation related businesses on the airfield, so not even by selling space for non-related industrial or storage units.
The first thing was: it wasn’t ludicrously overstaffed. At most 3 people were working there at any one time (manager and 2 line guys). They had a contractor to come in every so often to mow the grass. Some airports seem to have staffing levels far exceeding what’s actually needed, and it must be costing a fortune.
The second thing was: you could use the airport whenever you wanted: the office didn’t have to be open to use the airfield, and you didn’t need to have some bureaucratic pile of paperwork to operate out of hours. You could use it H24, and it had pilot controlled lighting. This made the airport more useful, made sure hangars remained full (there was a waiting list), and made sure fuel sales continued.
This was of course in the US.
dublinpilot wrote:
Realistically, I can’t imagine any regional airport, able to generate 1 movement every 3 minutes, all day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.
Hello Colm,
well, I chose arbitrary figures which are easy to calculate. The actual cost calc is much more complex as also the GA related additional stuff goes inside such as restaurants, maintenance and other companies rental income e.t.c.
However, looking at our most busy airfields as they were, we have at least 5 of them which create an average of more than 100 movements a day, Birrfeld and Grenchen (>200) as well as Bern, Locarno, Sion and Lausanne which create more than 100. Of these, Bern has airline traffic but fortunately a pro GA minded management. There are some which are in the 20k movements which also have airline traffic and which, to an extent, fall into the GA expensive cathegory. They could have much more GA but don’t actively want it.
So we have a bit of a chicken/egg situation: There are some of the mixed use airfields which COULD have a LOT more GA if they put their prices down but prefer to either price them out or keep them low. The most brutal in Switzerland is Samedan, who have lost most of their GA due to exactly that scheme, even though there it is not the airlines but actually Biz Jets the management fancies. Consequently, light GA is mostly out, as one night stop is in the region of 180.- CHF.
More brutal examples exist in Germany and elsewhere, but there are also examples of anti GA policy in Switzerland, namely on the large airports. In Geneva, their director actually stated that he is of the clear opinion that GA has no space there and should go to hell, only reason he can’t do that is because the CAA won’t let him, same goes for ZRH who have long declared their wish to exterminate GA, but have at least partly given in by now.
There are examples where it works just fine, places like Memmingen, Hannover, Hamburg and others. Augsburg was an example where they had airline traffic which disappeared, but they apparently were wise enough not to bet all their horses on that. I recall some other examples, where the daily Ryan Air Flight got their managers into extasy until the finally bowed out and left them with investment ruins.
dublinpilot wrote:
Most busy GA airport are busy with circuit traffic, most of which is from schools which have flat fee arrangements. Most GA only flies when the weather is nice, so many days with little or no activity
I don’t know of any flat rates in Switzerland, I think they are actually prohibited on public airports. Never the less, the figures speak for themselfs, apart, those airports we are talking about are IFR mostly, so the weather does not play that bad a role. Add to that that hangar fees as well as maintenance e.t.c. does not depend on the weather as well.
dublinpilot wrote:
That rarely happens. Regional airports are usually struggling for survival. They don’t get bank borrowings. Either the government steps in to assist with “regional development” probably supplemented by some EU grant, or more likely they struggle on with the same creaking old facilities.
It has happened a lot in Germany in recent years. There were several former military bases which got massive subsidies with the promise of a Ryanair or other airline and who today are almost totally devoid of any traffic. I remember several discussions regarding some of those where local GA was simply ignored for years or even actively fought to leave the airports to them.
The other balant example is Greece, where dozens of large airports lay totally dormant and only open to the one or two scheduled services and actively keep GA out instead of attracting them. There, it is more a question of mentality and outright laziness of the people in charge, but the result is the same.
I’d think there are more of that kind, in Spain the operator of the larger fields charges HUGE taxes on some of them to avoid getting GA without any necessity. I am sure other posters here can think of more examples.
