What discourages European pilots from flying to the UK?

Interesting range of responses!

I have not flown to UK myself (although planned it several times and one time joined up as a passenger on a GA flight to Manston, RIP) but none of the reasons brought forward above would keep me from flying there in principle.

I think Pytlak’s statistical comment pretty much sums it up. I find the UK and Ireland just as interesting as any other European country within reach – some of which I have visited, some of which not (yet).

If I was considering a trip to the UK, neither the Basic Service nor the airspace structure, nor the accent, nor the immigration procedure would keep me from going. Much like the French airspace structure doesn’t keep me from going or the Italian accent doesn’t keep me from going or the immigration procedure to Belarus doesn’t keep me from going. These are things do be dealt with on the flight and they are part of the fun. I’m actually very surprised these are things that keep pilots actually from going there!

The weather-related rate of cancellation of UK-bound trips is higher though than trips planned to the south of Europe..

Pytlak wrote:

LANGUAGE barrier – it seems to me that British controllers compete with American ones trying to be as much unintelligible as possible. The difference between US and UK controllers is that in case of US controllers they at least try to give you information that is practical and pertinent to your flight… (I mean they are helpful :-))

There’s something to it. I used to fly jumpseat into JFK a lot of times and had the chance to visit their tower pre-2001. Cool folks, sometimes I wish all European ATCO’s (well, and some from other places) would have to do an exchange year there before working here, but then again, most European controllers are severely restricted by their CYA CAA’s and actually castrated in what they can do as opposed to what they are capable of. NY ATC was always fun to listen to particularly as they still had the time for a good laugh. Even Kennedy Ground was fun to listen to (and those who missed it, look for Kennedy Steve


)

Fun memory of a British controller years’n years ago, flying in on a Caravelle with two Swiss-French pilots. A clearly unnerved gent on the other side with not quite the Oxford English (more like a Yorkshire Man if I got the dialect right) shouting at us “You are supposed to use the Queen’s English here!” after he had to repeat an instruction we missed… Out of the blue yonder comes a voice “So are you mate!” Needless to say inquiries along the lines of “who said that” went unanswered.

But then again, David Gunson has managed to make me an all time fan of British ATCO’s. Unforgettable and one of a kind. “I apologize, sir, but the wind is blowing from your end!” “If you can see daylight, you should tell somebody”.

Most pilots dream of flying to foreign lands, but the dreaming and the reality clash and reality wins.
Reality 1: Money and the willingness to spend it. I plan a flight from A to B, but then realise I can get there for less money by airline. Ok you can’t beat flying there yourself but money is the limiting factor.
Reality 2: Dreading the bureaucracy. If you have ever read of GA pilots who have flown around the world, the one thing that stands out in all their accounts is bureaucracy. Even with SERA there is still a level of bureaucracy to deal with. Most pilots (most humans) want an easy life and regard dealing with rules and regulations as a problem to be avoided.
Reality 3: Worries about ditching: Not to treated lightly but if you look at the statistics, the number of engine failures per 100,000 miles flown is very small. I always wear a life jacket if I am going to cross any stretch of water. I also have a life raft rented on an annual basis, so I always have a “fresh” one. If you look on You Tube, you will see any amount of pilots crossing long distances over water, wearing no safety gear. They probable think that if they ditch they will not survive, so they don’t bother. That’s blasé.
Reality 4: Language. I have noticed the lack of French pilots visiting the UK and my conclusion is, they worry about language. If you have an EASA licence you have to have an endorsement as to the level of English you can speak. It must be a low level because so many French airfields still allow French only, usually when there is no controller on duty. If I was French with a low level of English, I would stay in France. Likewise, if French was the international language of ATC, I would stay in the UK.
Reality 5: Commitment. To do any serious touring requires commitment; to spend the money, to fly a capable aircraft, to be prepared to cope with bureaucracy etc
Example; when I did my first long distance flight (UK to Portugal) in the days before the Euro, before mobile phones, before GPS, before internet weather services, I couldn’t contemplate doing it VFR because I worried excessively about avoiding control zones en-route, navigation etc. All I had done up to that point was cross channel to L2K and Calais. So that was what prompted me to get an Instrument rating. (commitment).

Peter_Mundy wrote:

Food, non-Schengen, overhead join, weather, petty rules, generally poor hotels……

Food at airfields…I agree. Non-Schengen and petty rules….covered by my observations on bureaucracy. Overhead join..I agree, it is crap. I would prefer the American system of joining on the 45. Weather…well it’s the weather?….Poor hotels…depends how fussy you are.
We have some great fly-ins and I encourage continental pilots to attend.

There is no airfield with custom close to Paris (Issy and Le Bourget are not for GA aeroplane pilots). That’s my main reason for not visiting the UK very often.
For French people: most of us don’t speak a good enough English. Although I trained for my CPL, CRI and FI in the UK, I still fail from time to time to understand what is said to me on the radio, and of course what other pilots say.
My fellow French pilots are usually not afraid by the UK rules (which are significantly different) because as a rule, they don’t care about rules.

Piotr_Szut wrote:

There is no airfield with custom close to Paris (Issy and Le Bourget are not for GA aeroplane pilots). That’s my main reason for not visiting the UK very often.

But you don’t need to clear customs to visit the UK. At least not for another year.

Some airfields around Paris do have customs (PPR) but not immigration which is what you need to fly to the UK. From Pontoise or Toussus I can fly direct to Switzerland or Norway, but not to the UK.

For someone UK based, this is an interesting thread to read. I think a lot of people are missing out! Let me pick up a few points, starting with those which are probably the most valid:

• Schengen. At the UK end it is trivially addressed with the GAR form (for EU passport holders, at least; 24hrs’ notice for others) but at the other end you have to use an airport with Immigration, and those are shrinking especially in France.

• Pytlak’s 4:1 ratio is spot on But the visitor ratio we see is more like 10:1 or more. Maybe there is a general tendency to “fly south”, which would make sense, because it gets warmer.

• Language. That is a fair point. In Europe, Brits do have an unfair advantage in aviation! And the Irish too but they have much further to travel Much of “old southern Europe” especially finds this an issue e.g. see here. Anyone based in the UK who does business with mainland Europe will very quickly learn how this works: there is a massive difference across mainland Europe in the ability (and equally the willingness even if the ability exists) to speak English. However, the parts of Europe closest to the south-east UK (the countries to the south-east of the UK) are pretty comfortable with it, yet we see few visitors from there.

• Accents. It seems clear that a resident of country X finds it easy to understand English spoken by a resident of X even if it is so heavily accented that a resident of any other country (including the UK) cannot understand it. English ATC tend to speak “Queen’s English” which is supposedly correctly pronounced English and is highly intelligible to English residents. It is probably less intelligible to others if their exposure to English is from locals speaking it with the domestic accent. And most pilots flying to the UK would be from N Europe. So I wonder where the chief exposure to English comes from around Europe. If it is from watching UK/American movies (not subtitled) etc then understanding UK ATC should be fine. And I regularly hear UK ATC go the extra mile to speak slowly and clearly for a visitor.

• Weather – N France, say Paris area and north of there, has much the same wx as southern UK and, as pointed out, Belgium etc get it a few hours later.

Some other points which may be the result of misconceptions and forum posts by pilots who have never visited the UK:

• The quadrature or semicircular or whatever rules are not used in UK Class G, and are not used in UK Class D because you are flying an ATC-assigned (or ATC-approved) altitude… I fly at “funny numbers” like 3300ft, 3700ft, etc. Most of UK GA, where there is no terrain, flies at 2000ft or even more at 1500ft.

• Food… Here is one funny thread. But you have to compare like for like. A £3 burger, fried in used 15W50, and served with one slice of cucumber which was chopped up the previous day (e.g. Wellesbourne, Lydd, Popham, and a hundred other UK airfields) cannot be compared with a €30 lunch at Le Touquet. And if you went to a restaurant off-airport (which is what most people do at Le Touquet) you could get a nice meal also in the UK. 10 mins’ walk from EGKA is a run-down town but with a very nice Italian restaurant. There are plenty of ways to spend £30 on a meal. There are loads of French airports where the cafe food could well be from a British roadside caravan… La Rochelle, Bergerac, Annecy, Calais… the croissants are probably nicer but that’s not “food”. 30 years ago it was different (even a tacky looking roadside cafe in France would serve simple cheap but nice food) but not any more… standards have converged. And elsewhere on the mainland the food tends to be stodgy and it gets worse (annual colonoscopy is advisable) as you travel east, and south… but as I say above you can find good stuff if you look for it, just like in the UK, but you always have to pay for it. But even a £30/€30 meal is most likely made from a freezer, anywhere in Europe – except in seaside locations or Greek/Croatian islands. And you probably won’t get fresh veg except on a Greek island.

• The overhead join is used only at some AFIS or A/G airfields on busy days, or at ATC airfields where there is so much traffic (sunny Sunday etc) that ATC cannot cope so they send any extras to the overhead where they can orbit at their leisure. Smarter pilots will go away an come back 15 mins later, but that’s expensive if you rent. I haven’t flown an OHJ for at least a year. I suspect that the real difference is that some SE UK GA airfields are really busy on a nice weekend and are best done on weekdays.

• Petty rules… yellow jackets are the one really ridiculous thing, but otherwise I have not seen a significant difference in stupid rules and procedures. If you fly to “farm strips” (and much of the GA community everywhere exists mostly on these) these are informal everywhere.

• Generally poor hotels… I don’t think there is any difference at a given price level, relative to the location. A €20 airb&b apartment in any European capital is likely to be a dump with leaking sewage pipes. A nice hotel in Cambridge will be like one in Switzerland, and at a similar price (10x bigger).

• Too much class A – post #17 covers that one well. It doesn’t really affect flying A to B as the detours are not expensive in track miles. And this is the picture higher up, at 3300ft (from EasyVFR). And Southend on the right and Solent (EGHI+EGHH) on the left give transits nearly always (Class D). On the mainland, Belgium has this. SE France has this (all plotted for 3300ft) which is basically unreadable and GA is able to function there only because ATC disregard the airspace (I suspect they can’t read it either and why should they – they all have radar!) and usually just clear you through. OTOH France is full of military areas which are no-go by default whereas the UK’s are the opposite; the UK mil airspace is mostly Class G and you can fly through it non-radio – even if doing so may not be too wise. Remember UK Class G is good for VFR and IFR, day or night, non-radio And if you cannot maintain VFR and have an IR you just turn up at an instrument airport and ask for the ILS etc. No need to beg an enroute controller for an IFR clearance (a handover to some higher religious authority) while you are heading into IMC. You cannot ask for more.

• The Basic Service. This is ICAO FIS (Flight Information Service) with a stupid name possibly produced by some management consultancy. It is mostly not a radar service but FIS in most of Europe is also not a radar (traffic information) service, at all possible GA levels. OCAS, there are no guarantees you will get traffic info, and there are no guarantees they will steer you away from prohibited areas (as I well know from busting a French ZIT, while under a radar service etc). Class G is Class G. It’s a free flying airspace! You don’t need ATC. Much of GA is nontransponding anyway… and in parts of Europe there are whole communities (homebuilt, UL) which fly below the radar, so to speak, so you are relying on the Big Sky.

• Europhobes. We do have a “politics” thread but let me just say what I am sure everybody who reads the papers knows deep down: the main difference between the UK and say France or Germany is that the UK got a referendum! Nobody else is going to get one, obviously! The vote to leave was only some 5-10 percentage points higher than it would have been in France or Germany, at certain times. The UK is absolutely not “anti European”. It is “anti Brussels central government” and its perceived arrogance, inappropriate regulation, and all sorts of other stuff. The UKIP was never going to be a long term player – no more than the right wing movements that exist everywhere on the mainland and where they are gaining traction whereas the UK referendum robbed the UK ones of traction. There is no significant dislike of foreigners in the UK, and foreign visitors are welcome.

• Ditching. The narrow Channel crossing is ~20nm. The mountainous regions of Europe, or the large areas of water in N Europe, and the huge German forests where aircraft destruction is virtually assured, are much bigger.

• Fuel prices. I don’t see a regular pattern where mainland Europe is cheaper, unless perhaps you fly all the time on the French grass scene, with TOTAL pumps and the TOTAL card. The variation around Europe is big. But the variation on a tank fill is no bigger than the cost of one reasonable meal, and if you fly by the fuel price you will be avoiding huge and very scenic parts of Europe.

We hope to see some of you at Cambridge

Aviathor wrote:

do have customs (PPR) but not immigration

I’m sure this will be obvious when it’s explained, but what is the point of this? You can fly to the airport with imported booze, but not imported people? Or is it that somebody who is already at the airport for another reason can accept customs declarations, but not stamp passports?

A nice summary Peter. A worthy effort to get more people to visit the UK by GA.

Having enjoyed my last trip to the UK (by car/ferry ) I am certainly inclined to come back someday. No chance of making it to the Cambridge fly-in though :(

redRover wrote:

I’m sure this will be obvious when it’s explained, but what is the point of this?

To allow flights to/from Switzerland (and Iceland and Norway, I but don’t think that is the motivation in France).