Maybe we should just agree that it is different in “vs the US. One of the things I like about traveling is that it is different. Different language, different food, different culture between France and the UK. A 30 min crossing. Whereas in the US everything is more standardized.
To me it makes Europe richer…
How many Europeans travel to visit the US because it has such a rich cultural heritage? Maintaining that is a big part of what makes Europe unique. Now you start standardizing…. what would happen?
Allow me to make a wild guess, the reason our friend in the story decided to fly to Greece in the first place is because it was different. Was he potentially trying to do things on the cheap? Benefit from a more lenient “culture”? Benefit from some weird loophole in local regulations?
Fact is he decided to fly to another country because clearly there was a benefit to him in doing so. Can’t have your cake and eat it…
OK let me have a go
Not so, for this US visitor to the EU, and he fails to point out a conversion is not what is required anyway (it is EASA papers)
The Eurocontrol system has been around for maybe 20 years – basically ever since Eurocontrol discovered unix 
It is true that when I was at an IR FTO (PAT at Bournemouth) in 2011 the lecturers didn’t know this, and the CAA IR exams likewise, but everybody else will know about it
How can you get an earlier flight plan than what you tried to file?
Mad fuel planning
He should not have departed in a hurry
LGTS has not had avgas since about 2005…. this flight took place somewhere around 10 years later
LGKV never had avgas
Didn’t he get enroute wx? There are wx charts, all sorts of stuff…
No sh*t Sherlock! That’s also true for anywhere else in the world.
Nonsense.
That’s true just about everywhere to various degrees. It is up to the pilot to plan the route etc
How would VFR burn less fuel? You have to remain OCAS in most parts…
Nonsense.
It would be a very trusting person to think an app is going to have a correct database for everywhere.
Impossible except at LGKR, LGAV, LGMG, LGIR, LGST, LGSM, LGRP, LGSO (admittedly some of these have shafted over by fraport, so they are expensive)
I hope not this one…
LFHNflightstudent wrote:
Now you start standardizing…. what would happen?
Once people can travel in light aircraft without flight plans, ATC across national borders or other unwarranted aviation specific restrictions, more people will make those flights. Then the business of supporting them grows. Fuel might even become available. Then even more people do it, the political lobby gets stronger, and more growth occurs. In the end you have normal people using GA for its intended purpose within the area of Europe that already operates on the same basis for other modes of transport.
Another option that is doubtless more popular to some is that European GA is largely stripped of international flying via the growth of non-ICAO compliant aviation, and becomes an activity enjoyed by Europeans within their own countries, except for a privileged elite.
Silvaire wrote:
Once people can travel in light aircraft without flight plans, ATC across national borders or other unwarranted aviation specific restrictions, more people will make those flights. Then the business of supporting them grows. Fuel might even become available. Then even more people do it, the political lobby gets stronger, and more growth occurs. In the end you have normal people using GA for its intended purpose within the area of Europe that currently operates on the same basis for other modes of transport.Now I like practicality as much as anyone else, but there is one fundamental difference between Europe and the US which you are not accounting for. Far less people own planes, and 99 pct of the people would still not travel by airplane because the economics of it simply do not work. Everyone drives a car, there are fuel stations everywhere, yet fuel is not at the same price as it is in the states…
Nobody I fly with in the US does it because the economics “work”. The core of the activity is doing it because its fun, just like riding a motorcycle internationally in Europe – I’ve done a great deal of that, very often with European friends who enjoy it as much as I do. Some of those motorcycles cost Euro 25K, can only be ridden 6 months a year depending on climate and use more fuel than a car… while you’re getting wet in the rain. It’s still fun
GA is a fun way to get from place to place and see more of the world from new vantage points. That’s its purpose.
Peter wrote:
OK, but lt me say again: this flying adventure was not done in Sweden. It was done (a) elsewhere and (b) across several countries.
I wasn’t talking about the flying adventure. I was responding to Silvaire’s claim that crossing borders within the Schengen part of EU should be as easy by air as it is by car and I said that it is. But if you prefer, I can talk about a flight from an airstrip in Spain to an airstrip in Germany instead.
Indeed, but examining all the fish which need to be fried when flying a plane, all that schengen does for you is that it opens up a lot more (mostly small) departure and destination airport options. It doesn’t change anything else about the flight. Assuming the departure and destination airports are acceptable to you, practically all the work is just the same. In many cases you still need to carry a passport because some policeman will demand seeing it…
I suggest going back up to my post above and listing which of those points ought to have been common knowledge to a pilot. Any pilot, not just one living and flying permanently in Europe.
On the other point, America is different from Europe in that it doesn’t have 1000+ years of history. In terms of buldings, it was built much more recently. But it does have a lot of amazing landscapes (I travelled there a lot in the 1980s).
Silvaire wrote:
Once people can travel in light aircraft without flight plans
The guy in the article would need a flight plan in the USA – he was IFR. When I lived in Houston, I certainly had to file flight plans whenever I wanted to fly IFR!
VFR flightplans for international flights are hardly an impediment and won’t discourage anyone from flying. It takes roughly 2 seconds for me to file one by pressing the ‘File flight plan’ button on Skydemon. Yes, it would be better if intra-Schengen flights didn’t need them (and I agree, there should be no more requirements imposed on a light aircraft crossing a Schengen border than a car) but filing a VFR flight plan is trivially easy and won’t deter anyone from making a flight. In terms of fish to fry, filing a flight plan is not even a minnow.
We should do the article’s author the favour by not taking the content seriously – at least not taking it for face value.
This is a polemic write-up of a hypothetical trip to Greece. Intention is to show the state of European GA. Granted, point taken.
Otherwise, the article would be too absurd to support his point. Flying into the most GA-adverse country in Europe (every single pilot interested in flying to the Balkan knows this) without fuel planning, without weather checking, without idea of IFR flight planning procedures and then complaining afterwards – not very probable.
We probably all agree that European GA would be better off if a lot of “mind sets” at all levels (pilots, FI, CAA, EASA) would change. But I am not certain beyond that lowest common denominator: Europe is a product of history, development of GA is a product of cultural and economical facts, the current situation of GA is a product of actual tendencies and interest of the different societies. Negating this, wishing history otherwise is … defiant, mindless and well below what one would expect of an academic. Analogies have been mentioned previously: Flying an Iranian GA plane from Columbia via Mexico during a Caribbean hurricane and landing without permission on a US Airforce base would entail consequences. It is as mindless as some Europeans complaints about US American moral concepts of social security, health insurance, crime fighting, weapons, use of military might.
IMHO, the discussion should focus on positive facts in US GA and possible reasons for that which might serve as a model here.
I apologize for strong language (lacking the language skills for more subtle remarks)
Your language is just fine, a_kraut
It is possible that the article is fiction, but I suspect not, because it contains some bits which he would have known only if he tried the journey. One of these is getting aeroclub fuel at Thessaloniki LGTS. I know about this; I was offered this a few years ago at some €600 for a 200 litre drum, and I would have to buy a whole drum(s). But it could not be guaranteed which made the deal useless to me because, upon landing at LGTS, I would not have had enough avgas in the tanks to go anywhere else which has avgas… well maybe LGMG which is not a port of entry. Kavala LGKV also had a partial drum of avgas, which had been sitting there a number of years and nobody knew how old it was
More here and there is some funny stuff there…
Today the Greek situation is different, with LGIO rendering the others irrelevant assuming your plane has a reasonable range.
I agree with what you say about european aviation infrastructure being no more than a product of the european political landscape, and how the legacy of the various wars here has influenced the landscape, and that it will probably never change. We pilots just need to find ways to work around the restrictions effectively.
