Sadly, the HIAL airports have become extremely pricey. In particular, parking charges have become outrageous, over 100 GBP for 24 hours. Landings (including a new „NAV fee“???) almost 50 GBP each.
See here.
HIAL airports are: Barra, Benbecula, Campbeltown, Dundee, Inverness, Islay, Kirkwall, Stornoway, Sumburgh, Tiree, Wick.
Let‘s hope someone can change their minds.
Obviously they have decided they don’t want GA there. I was thinking of flying to Scotland later this year; fortunately, I’ve already visited (eg) Islay, at the time my landing fee including 24 hours parking was around GBP 30. Now, I’ll go elsewhere, think I’ll visit Ireland instead.
The question is – why do they believe their parking space is in such high demand that they demand GBP 40 for the first 4 hours or GBP 90 for the first 24 hours – that’s more expensive than parking a car at Frankfurt Airport?! When I landed at Islay, apart from the Island hopper, mine was the only plane there….. a pity but if they don’t want us, fine.
It is probably not done to specifically exclude GA. What I’ve been told by locals up there is that nobody wants to do any work because the social security is so good. Hence e.g. most of the hospitality jobs are done by people from Poland, etc. So the only way for the airports to balance their budget on negligible traffic is to charge ridiculous fees, and the local labour problems just make it worse. Scotland (and N Ireland) are giant black holes for social security spending.
And, as everywhere, local govt staff average IQ is well below average. For example, here, S England, if there is a pothole in the road, they send a man out to measure it. He’s costing about 100k (salary and office space allocation). He measures the depth. If less than 5cm, nothing is done. If more than 5cm, he gets out a spray can of white paint and marks it. Some weeks or month later (by which time the pothole is 10cm and enough to damage a car, but the council has a statutory defence) what is best described as a “criminal gang” turns up and chucks some tarmac into the hole, which lasts ~ 3 months. And this is in the richest part of the UK!
But with almost no traffic, these airports have to be council owned. Privately, they could not exist at all.
Glad to see Oban is not on that list.
You should not avoid Scotland due to this. Just go somewhere else up there. You will spend several times more on avgas anyway.
Peter wrote:
You will spend several times more on avgas anyway.
Not with my plane…. Between 17 (down low) and 13 (up high) litres per hour, Super 95, 120Knots True… My hourly rate is approximately €30 – 35 / hour, why would I spend up to 6 times that for a single landing???
Not with my plane
Nor with mine… nor many others.
People, including @Peter, still don’t realize that the majority of GA airplanes don’t need or want Avgas, and that this proportion is on the increase 
Still, looking forward to future trips to Scotland, where there luckily still are strips not figuring on that list.
Wick is going to be bad news for the ferry industry and the local support company if ferry pilots will change to a different airfield.
It simply continues…. crazy. More and more airports outprice GA. Sooner or later, I guess this will kill any serious travel with our class of airplanes.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
It simply continues…. crazy. More and more airports outprice GA. Sooner or later, I guess this will kill any serious travel with our class of airplanes.
The only way for GA to not be “out-priced”, is when GA somehow can piggyback without actually paying it’s share. 3 km of tarmac, security, tower, ATC, etc etc required for CAT cost a lot of money, and dividing this by all aircraft after some fair movements- and MTOW formula, the cost for GA will be high. We could go back to state owned, state financed everything. This would solve all GA problems, but I don’t see that happening anytime soon.
Private GA in it’s basic form don’t need to cost anything in terms of infrastructure (very little at least). Yesterday I took the Cub for a spin, landed at a farm where no aircraft has set it’s feet But, those who insist on using all the infrastructure of CAT, it’s not entirely unreasonable they also pay the actual costs for this, is it?
Obviously those airports in Scotland cannot be economically viable. It’s better for them to only have one single GA plane that pay, than 1000 that doesn’t. I would think they all are very much like all the small airports in Norway where Widerøe flies. The only way for them to keep operating at all, is getting money from the 3-4 largest airports in Norway. That’s how it works. 3-4 largest airports financing everything. Thus, it’s all politics. There has to be political will to make it happen. This also goes for GA. There’s zero economical incentive to keep GA alive at airports for CAT (unless they pay CAT cost). The basic principle has to be that the air is free for everyone. No one has the right to grab airspace and land. reshape everything, then charge others for services they don’t need, have no use for whatsoever. That’s the only way to approach this IMO.
LeSving wrote:
That’s how it works. 3-4 largest airports financing everything.
That makes sense because of all the domestic traffic that the smaller airports generate fot the larger ones. In Sweden, the profits from Stockholm/Arlanda used to subsidise numerous smaller airports exactly because most traffic from those airports was to/from Arlanda. AFAIK, the EU membership put an end to that.
LeSving wrote:
The only way for GA to not be “out-priced”, is when GA somehow can piggyback without actually paying it’s share. 3 km of tarmac, security, tower, ATC, etc etc required for CAT cost a lot of money, and dividing this by all aircraft after some fair movements- and MTOW formula, the cost for GA will be high.
The problem is quite simple: Airports are infrastructure, not profit centers. Like roads, railways and harbours. So they need to grant fair access to every participant of traffic without regard of “commercial viability” in the narrow picture, but that viability has to be regarded in the big picture, where an airport, a road e.t.c. has the function to serve the people and the communities they are located at. Logically therefore, airports and roads need to be mainly tax funded.
In most countries, road usage is paid for partly via a vehicle tax, fuel tax and communities or even countries in order to have an infrastructure which makes all communities accessible. You pay a certain amount of tax on your car to get a license plate which allows you to use the roads. In some instances, you have to pay additionally such as in road pricing or in additional “stickers” e.g. as in Austria or Switzerland, where you have to pay CHF 40.- per year for the motorways. Some countries charge fees for their motorways separately.
The analogy to airports and airfields, particularly those which service communities with CAT, is that they are also the way to reach a certain community it serves by air. However, those airports appear to feel the need to finance themselves outside of the infrastructure thought, that is directly only via fees and direct income from the usership. And therein lies a big rub: If an airport makes a deficit, they rise the taxes in order to compensate that, but instead they get LESS traffic and less income, they loose renters such as maintenance shops and GA oriented services too. And while individually those may be small revenues, togther they may be not so small after all. In smaller CAT airports, this is often how it goes, you loose clients due to outpricing and then they shout for state help or close up once the single Ryan Air decides not to serve that place anymore.
If you make a comparison with roads, particularly in places like remote Norway, you’d have to charge people who live in places where roads are not packed daily irresponsible amounts of money to keep their roads going. Which would most probably lead to people leaving those communities which then fall into disrepair and eventually become ghost towns. No infrastructure can afford that, so they pay for the upkeep of those roads with tax money.
LeSving wrote:
We could go back to state owned, state financed everything. This would solve all GA problems, but I don’t see that happening anytime soon.
Pretty much, yes. Airports NEED to be treated equally as other infrastructure, not profit centers. That is runways, tarmacs, basic facilities. There is nothing wrong with making profit with rentals, terminal services, e.t.c. which are necessary for CAT and to a certain degree GA too, but the basic facilities MUST be available for everyone. That clearly means airports per se have to be financed by the taxpayer and quite possibly by the users with flat charge taxes.
Again, take roads as an example: Most countries finance them via vehicle taxes which are higher for lorries than cars. Every car has to pay their share which is usually a yearly fee and can then use most roads for free. This is one possibility to deal with airports too: Make a flat charge for small GA up to 2 T for instance per annum which covers all landing and ATC fees, and force airports to have facilities for them outside the security and CAT area where they can operate freely. In return, the airport gets money out of this pot according to it’s movements by the cathegory of traffic. The rest is paid by the communities the airport serves or by the country itself for larger airports which serve larger parts of the country.
LeSving wrote:
Obviously those airports in Scotland cannot be economically viable. It’s better for them to only have one single GA plane that pay, than 1000 that doesn’t. I would think they all are very much like all the small airports in Norway where Widerøe flies. The only way for them to keep operating at all, is getting money from the 3-4 largest airports in Norway. That’s how it works. 3-4 largest airports financing everything.
That and the communities they serve, yes.
LeSving wrote:
Thus, it’s all politics. There has to be political will to make it happen. This also goes for GA. There’s zero economical incentive to keep GA alive at airports for CAT (unless they pay CAT cost). The basic principle has to be that the air is free for everyone. No one has the right to grab airspace and land. reshape everything, then charge others for services they don’t need, have no use for whatsoever. That’s the only way to approach this IMO.
Absolutely.
And this has to happen on an European level within the EU and associated countries such as the UK, Norway, Switzerland e.t.c. It only works if finally the whole airport financing gets taken away from profit centers and brought back to state control. Again and to make it perfectly clear: That means, runways, tarmacs, taxiways, navigational aids, ATC and other basic services which guarantee the operation of the airport proper. And with that, there has to be a state guaranteed right of usage for fees which are capped at a certain amount per ton which include all basic services and specifically bans the abuse of monopoly via outpricing, PPR, lazy bureaucrats and so on.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
as in Austria or Switzerland, where you have to pay CHF 40.- per year for the motorways.
That’s pretty much how GA works in Norway, when using Avinor airports that is. You pay a yearly fee. This is dependent on MTOW. It’s about €500 and up, €1000+ for a C-172. What you get is ATC obviously, free transport to/from the aircraft, free parking – sort of, but you get free (and secured) parking regardless. It’s not nothing, but it’s not cheap either. I’m not sure if this reflects the actual cost, perhaps?, but it depends on how much you fly obviously. A single take off costs €25 and up (parking is still free). Outside operational hours it’s also free. One take off with a C-172 is about €35, so it’s not a huge difference from those Scottish fields (parking aside).
However. If every country had a similar yearly fee thing, then the cost would add up indeed, unless some cooperation existed, which I’m sure never will happen. Landing on private strips is usually free anyway… The alternative is therefore obviously private strips, and they come in all shapes and lengths, making a C-185 much more suited than a C-172 (unless operating it as a 2 seat exclusively and with 180 HP), or just about every single experimental and UL (except Lancair and a few other oddities).
A grass/dirt strip doesn’t cost much. It’s something one single individual can manage without any sort of problems. A commercial airport costs lots and lots to create, maintain and operate.
