Good point Silvaire.
EASA has the rulemaking function the FAA has, but not the funding. In fact, most airports are private enterprises. Most small airport are club owned and treated such, that is as club first and everyone else beyond second to the point where some airfields are club only. So they are not really infrastructure, but pure hobby outfits.
That is I guess the biggest problem in Europe re GA airports. As long as these are privately owned and funded, as long as they are purely daylight-VFR ops and as long as they are very restrictive about who can fly or base there, GA simply has not got the infrastructure it would need to make it anything close to an US infrastructure.
Apart, a lot of even large international airports have night bans and are massively anti GA.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
Apart, a lot of even large international airports have night bans and are massively anti GA.
“Massively anti GA” I would not say – this weekend, I flew with a student on both days and found it incredible once again, how many pilots of piston singles, motorgliders and microlights asked for permission to cross the control zone and perform a low approach at my home base and none of them was refused. Night bans are in force at 90 percent of airports around here. Personally I think this is a vast improvement in quality of life for everyone: Business people (“Sorry I can’t attend a meeting in London at 8 AM, our airport opens at 6 only, so please schedule for 9 O’clock” – and miraculously, that is appreciated by all other attendees of that meeting as well…), people living around the airports and – most importantly – pilots! My home base is open 24 hours for propeller driven aircraft but has a night flying ban for jets. The best thing I ever did was the move from props to jets. No more alarm clock set for 2 O’clock in the morning or home at 4 O’clock. Earliest departure at 6 AM, latest landing at 11:30 PM. Improves the quality of life by 300 percent. Money is not everything in life.
what_next wrote:
how many pilots of piston singles, motorgliders and microlights asked for permission to cross the control zone and perform a low approach at my home base and none of them was refused.
Well, yes, ATC most of the time are very accomodating, as long as people are proficient and don’t mess up their traffic. I look at most of them as part of the aviation family and they very rarely are the folks I am talking about. That goes more in the direction of airport management and certain misguided individuals in the airlines who think that their problems can all be solved by getting rid of GA.
what_next wrote:
Personally I think this is a vast improvement in quality of life for everyone
Depends what kind of night ban we are talking about. 11pm to 6am is fine for most purposes. But most GA airports close up at between 6 and 8 and eventually open at 9 or 10 if they have night flying capability at all (and with those hours why would they bother) with a lunch break thrown in. Add to that slots and PPR and you get a pretty good mess. In summer, we could easily fly even VFR day until 2130, but the airfields close off at 8pm so the neighbours can enjoy their grill parties. The whole point of using GA for travel is to be able to do so at decent times. Well, in winter, that can mean closing times at 4pm or so. That is not infrastructure to speak of.
The advantage of your own strip is that the opening hours are whatever you want.
In the UK, you can operate H24 (subject to complaint issues etc). There is no law banning night or OVC001 ops etc. I don’t know if other countries in Europe have night etc bans on privately owned strips.
In practice one would install runway edge lights. The bit one in theory needs to be a bit quiet about is whether they are pilot controlled. I don’t know what the latest situation is on that but I very much doubt anybody would enforce it.
You can’t create a GPS approach in Europe for a private strip, short of creating user waypoints but then you won’t get the automatic 5nm / 1nm / 0.3nm auto scale decrease as you approach it. LPV is not possible at all, unless you build a totally DIY GPS. None of the uncertified GPSs do any sort of GPS approach, either. And you would never get an airfield license for an ILS picked up on Ebay for 10k, like one which was for sale recently 
I figure the thread drifted far enough that I can write that we (the local aeroclub at EPKP) just converted a “private use” field (in continuous operation since 1952, and yes, we accepted all traffic, day and night, and didn’t even charge a landing fee) to a “public airfield with limited certification” – so I guess we went the other way. If someone wants to fund a tarmac runway (1000×50m) please get in touch. And no, we do not restrict owners from doing maintenance in “their” hangars. “Their” because the hangars are owned by the club, but long-term leased (8 years, I think) to those who helped fund their construction.
Peter wrote:
In practice one would install runway edge lights. The bit one in theory needs to be a bit quiet about is whether they are pilot controlled. I don’t know what the latest situation is on that but I very much doubt anybody would enforce it.
I read somewhere (maybe a year ago or more) that the UK either had started to or was planning to allow PCL. Now sure where though.
Actually, from the CAA:
http://www.caa.co.uk/News/Pilot-controlled-lighting-switched-on-for-GA-pilots/?catid=4294967493
They even mention unlicenced aerodromes have been using them for years.
Yes; I now recall this. We did it here too, several times e.g. here
The long standing regulation was that licensed aerodromes were not allowed to have PCL. The way it was written was misinterpreted for decades that PCL was not allowed. But unlicensed ones were always allowed to have PCL.
This used to be restrictive in the days when PPL training required a licensed aerodrome. That requirement ended a few years ago too. However most licensed aerodromes are not going to go unlicensed (even though it saves 5k-10k/year, reportedly) because they lose CAA protection from somebody growing 100ft trees at the end of the runway and closing the place down. Obviously the solution to that is to own enough land at the ends, but not everyone can do that, and most would use all land they have for the runway.
Peter wrote:
What is PSP?
Perforated Steel Planking…..used in WW2….they had it at Seletar airfield for taxyways in Singapore when I learned to fly there 20 odd years ago….
Peter wrote:
The advantage of your own strip is that the opening hours are whatever you want.In the UK, you can operate H24 (subject to complaint issues etc).
I’d be taking that with a bucketload of salt Peter.
The way I experience it here, if your strip is not somewhere totally out in the boonies with nobody around in a 10km radius to hear or see your plane, anyone just noticing that something is going on will run to the local council and the CAA and start complaining. That is in daylight! At night, the sound of a propeller carries pretty far and you can expect hundreds of calls to the police and the CAA if you ever consider flying at night. And what I understand is that in the UK you need planning permission even to build a garden shed, which requires up to a year of quarrels with the local council. Over here, I would not even go through the trouble to try, totally worthless effort.
Just to give you an idea: We have a transit propeller flight at about 3am every night over Swiss airspace. He is a cargo plane which travels at about FL240 from Bergamo to somewhere north of here I think. EVERY NIGHT the noise phone at Zürich airport gets complaints because of this guy, often by the same people who KNOW what it is but who will call in anyhow. There have been people demanding that the nightban for airport movements in Switzerland should be extended to overflights too, realistically speaking for airplanes whose noise can be heard on the ground, which probably means below FL300.
Maybe the Brits are still more tolerant than the Swiss or still have more space.
