I still dont understand why we put up with such excessive landing fees at “larger” airports. I have been into Miami International twice this month in a 22 and paid $75 all in including a minimium $55 fuel upload (so an effective net cost of $20, £16, E18.5) and yet paid over £150 into Southampton and more for Bristol (and doubtless even more for Gatwick or Birmingham or other places in Europe) and that with parking, landing and IFR handling. I know the question is all a bit rhetorical but symptomatic of my frustration that we are so stitched up. Moreover I like our “ways” but it isnt even as if we receive a service to reflect the stitching – after all in Miami as an example there is a red mat to step onto, “free” drinks (hot and cold), little snacks, free local transport hmmm. I know they probably arent making any money out of it, but should larger airports be able to totally price GA out of the market and should they be “allowed” to do so? After all I cant see that they are short of space, and even if they are, they could limit the number of movements, as Southampton do with respect to the spaces on their GA ramp, but not limit it by use price as the controlling factor.
It seems that the US is very well set-up for GA. I try to avoid moaning about landing fees working on the basis that we don’t live in trees and eat leaves!… They have to make these large facilities pay somehow.
I did get a price for Bristol last week which at just under £200 for a day visit I did find excessive (and that was handeling through the flying club!)
Compare this with say Oxford, which has great facilities, ATC, and operations where you can stay for the whole weekend for approx £20 of parking if you take 50ltr of fuel. Its cheaper to park a plane than a car in oxford! The Operations team are friendly and booked a hotel for me at a huge saving on the rate card. The lounge area is great with drinks, space for briefing etc so we can get it right in some places in the UK :-)
I think the answer to the op question is simple: big airports don’t want (very) small aircraft. High prices are the best repellant.
Recently, at LEIB (Ibiza, Spain) they made handling compulsory. So going there is now 180 euros or so, all in. Effectively dried up the light aircraft traffic, so mission accomplished. Especially frustrating for those concerned, because there is no alternative airport there. At least in Mallorca and Menorca you have a cheap alternative.
I have seen one version of this scenario at one south UK airport, where a certain character “convinced” the management to let him set up a handling company, with the business case being a “discount” on jet fuel for bizjets. It was years before management realised this was silly (runway too short for most of them) and no good at all for the airport, but in the meantime the airport lost practically all twin piston business (due to the weight threshold triggering mandatory “handling”). And once the UK forum airfield lynch mob (very active on the two main chat sites) gets their teeth into something, they trash the airport for the next 10 years, encouraging a boycott (which they do for any place charging more than £10).
Fortunately things are back now.
So that was a case of an opportunist coupled with gullible management.
I am sure the likes of Signature have the procedure well polished. “We will take dirty noisy smelly piston GA (actual words used at Aberdeen) off your hands”.
But the bickering and infighting which is so typical of GA here in Europe doesn’t help the relationships.
Peter wrote:
due to the weight threshold triggering mandatory “handling”
The main cost factor is in most cases not the landing fee, but this. The whole concept of a weight based “mandatory handling” scheme smells like a rip-off. Either you need handling because otherwise you can’t get to or from your airplane, or you don’t. But there is no reason why this should suddenly become necessary once your MTOW is a bit higher. All the rest of the services of a handling company should be offered on a voluntary basis, i.e. the owner decides if he wants to pay for the service or not.
As to the original question why we put up with this… I don’t, really, I try to avoid places with mandatory handling as best as possible. And if we wanted to do something against such schemes, which often smell the abuse of a monopoly by some party involved, what do you suggest we do? I did offer once on PPL/IR to try to get behind this issue on an EU level (not with EASA, but with the European Commissioner for Competition), but there was zilch response (actually the response was “if we do anything we should start with the UK”). Otherwise I don’t see what an individual pilot could do.
Alex_ wrote:
They have to make these large facilities pay somehow.
The thing is, we in small GA don’t need all this most of the time, but there is no other alternative due to geographic restrictions. The airport will be there anyway, and we would actually be better off if it were a small airfield with no ATC and no “services”. But airports are part of a transport infrastructure which is heavily subjected to network effects. I.e. if you take one useable GA airport away (e.g. in the Munich area), everyone from Sweden to Spain who wants to use his plane to actually get somewhere suffers. But all these places are usually run by local heroes which have no incentive to take this global perspective into view. In the US, the FAA is heavily involved in protecting the utility of the whole system by giving improvement grants to airports which oblige them to keep operating for 20 years on reasonable terms to the public.
If not, everyone starts to exploit their local monopoly by maximizing prices (which an airport really is because you don’t have suitable alternatives if there is not a surplus of airfields, and because land close to cities is usually scarce so you can’t just open another airport right next door), to the detriment of the whole system, until it collapses, and then everyone is actually worse off.
Well, interesting, and I appreciate we have covered the usual issues.
I guess the reason we travel and the reason I raised it, is you appreciate time over other parts of the world sometimes do things very differently, and it works very well.
I guess and I think it is the case Americans have certain rights enschrined much as we have certain access rights to land, that they do not.
I think we should have similar rights, but I guess that will never be.
aart wrote:
I think the answer to the op question is simple: big airports don’t want (very) small aircraft. High prices are the best repellant.
Recently, at LEIB (Ibiza, Spain) they made handling compulsory. So going there is now 180 euros or so, all in. Effectively dried up the light aircraft traffic, so mission accomplished. Especially frustrating for those concerned, because there is no alternative airport there. At least in Mallorca and Menorca you have a cheap alternative.
AENA raised a bar a little further, just to make sure that lowly GA gets eradicated completely. Just received this quote from a handler, in euros:
Handling: 90
Communication/slots: 25 (if arriving IFR)
Airport tax: 14
Security fee: 480 (that’s 60 each for 4 persons arriving and the same for departure..)
Landing and parking fee: 85
Add VAT 21% and here you go: 840 euros Save 30 if VFR.
So in this case it’s clearly AENA themselves that are doing this, not the handling companies. Friend of mine who goes there regularly in a light jet also got a nice bill of 1.900. But that was because he had to bring a mechanic to the plane to resolve a problem..
Here goes my regular outing with my wife and 2 friends and stay for the night. Ahh well, airline ticket from Mallorca is 30 euros, and I’ve got some friends with a boat!
So in this case it’s clearly AENA themselves that are doing this, not the handling companies.
I am not suggesting this is so in this case but it is far from unusual for a handler to bribe the airport manager. The manager can’t take bribes directly from strangers (because that’s illegal in Europe, the USA, etc) so the handler “fronts” the arrangement.
Let’s face it – Spain is no stranger to this kind of thing, as a few thousand Brits will tell you 
The irony with handling is that they spend more time generating an invoice that they do providing a service.
Fuji_Abound wrote:
I still dont understand why we put up with such excessive landing fees at “larger” airports.
Because in the US its written into the Regs that if they get FAA funding to maintain their airport that being part of the National transportation infra structure then that the airport cant discriminate to be exclusionary by using excessive fees.
Google Signature Flight Support a European Corp who just got booted from one and is about to be booted in 3 other airports for Price gouging.
Their are no equivalent agencies here with that type pf Mandate. I did speak to AOPA USA and they were helping to get that type of regulation through in the EU but if someone here asked me what happened I would say it died because of lack of interest.
Witness the pushback Im getting from certain members in this group for a new style user fee at a German airport. What is it called the Camels nose under the tent?
