Private flights USA vs Europe

This is a long socioeconomic conversation we’ve had many times before on here, but in general it’s a conversion of many things:

Less friendly regulations and national variations.
Less acceptance of wealth or success (making private aircraft ownership shameful in the public’s eye).
Higher obstacles to become a pilot and to advance in ratings.
Regulators in bed with airline industry and unfavorable to GA.
Higher fuel taxes.
Shorter distances.
Better infrastructure.
Collectivistic mindset vs the US individualistic.
Etc, etc.

@ AdamFrisch,I agree with almost everything you list but my personal envy of the USA model is the almost total freedom to personalise your aircraft in the way you want whether certified or experimental, eg you buy a 50 year old aircraft, fix it up, add the latest avionics, engine monitoring, autopilots, making the old aircraft much like its much newer brother/sister. This all seems so difficult to do in Europe. Take fitting modern avionìccs in an old Robin or Jodel for example.

Hello James,

Adam has listed most issues quite well. As for your 2nd paragraph, there is one more problem which is getting really massive in Europe.

A lot of attractive locations are becoming inaccessible to GA as the airports there simply do not want any GA.They are employing different methods to make sure that as few as possible private airplanes come there and if so, nothing below a Citation please. Outpricing (high fees, taxes), compulsory handling, parking restrictions, general PPR, no Avgas, obstrusive opening hours the list is long and they are quite inventive.

In combination with other factors such as customs and immigration problems between countries (even within the EU and Schengen at times) will restrict you more and more. Either an Airport has customs and immigration or it does not have avgas, or a combination of several.

In addition, Europe has extremely complex airspace which makes VFR flying in many countries (France, UK, Italy amongst them) rather unattractive. You will find a lot of the ongoing discussions here, e.g. about airspace infringements, airport outpricing and GA avoidance e.t.c.

In short, GA in Europe has been for years on the agenda of politicians to eradicate and to restrict. To most Europeans, the US is the promised land of aviation whereas Europe is in most places only for hobby flying and serious GA for travelling e.t.c. is mainly for Biz Jets. Add to that the ongoing debate about climate change e.t.c which mobilizes more people and politicians to demand more and more restrictions, not only on GA but also on personal transport and other things. The future for individual transport in Europe at the moment looks very bleak.

From my point of view, the bigger issue is the price of flying hours for confortable SEP and MEP, beside all tax reduction on fuel for airliners, that make GA very pricy for individuals, and not attractive at the end. If GA to be treated with equity, that would be another story…

I would agree with most of the above, except "difficult " VFR flying in France. In my experience it is actually relatively easy.

EU: Shorter distances – better public transport – very cheap airline fares for the masses. Less and less GA, less lobbying, more milking for those left.

USA: Birthplace of aviation – longer distances – cumbersome public transport – air fares that make sense – more GA in all forms, accepted stakeholder lobbying – less milking of those involved.

Conclusion:
USA is the land of convenience. The mindset is: the airport is there, the runway is there, it doesn’t need anybody to function, why not use the infrastructure 24 hours (and find a working way to switch on lights).

In Europe we are discussing if private grass fields could be used without some designated watch person that has no real function anyway. Try and suggest a regional low use airport to be open for 24 hours and all hell breaks away!
Convenience means: It doesn’t make sense to fly two hours in a expensive private plane (let’s say an airconditioned Cirrus) and then spend 45 minutes waiting in the heat to refuel, pay fees, go through customs etc… yet that’s what we do in Europe.
Unless you carefully navigate around the burdensome spots and only use the handful of practical airfields that are still left.

Here in Denmark there are a lot of planes that does not have ADS-B or even mode S transponders and thus do not show up on the internet “radar”.

I think virtually any activity is made popular by an enjoyable ratio of hassles to fun. Even in US GA I don’t think comparison with other ways to get directly from A to B (with or without fun) has much to do with it. People fly to have fun – in aircraft ownership, operation and travel, all of which involve an outrageous number of hassles in Europe. Conversely, European motorcycle touring is very, very popular and it’s equally impractical if all you want is to arrive at your destination as quickly as possible without discomfort or delay. It’s just fun, the roads are enjoyable and scenic, the hotels are good and the artificial hassles are limited. And eventually you get somewhere as a secondary benefit

Re ADS-B and the like, I’m installing it now. A friend completed his installation a couple of weeks ago and last weekend was flying home, minding his own business in Class E airspace. He happened to be monitoring en route ATC and out of nowhere a controller asked if he is on frequency and if he knew about a parachute drop zone ahead of him. His response was ‘affirmative, for the last 40 years’. The protocol is to fly on one side of a road, with parachutists on the other side and there has never been an accident. If it continues, I can see that kind of monitoring and hassle alienating people in the US and driving them out of flying. Hopefully the controllers will get bored soon with the new info available to them.

Having flown extensively in the US (it is after all where I learned to fly, where I used to live, and where I used to own a plane), I have to say around 90% of the trouble flying here is not EASA, the CAA, policies on busting airspace, the LAA or any other amount of alphabet soup, it’s airports. Nearly every impediment for me taking a trip somewhere is the destination airfield. In no particular order, the real problems are:

• Tragically short opening hours at many airfields that are simultaneously affordable and which have ground transportation. Many are barely more than bankers’ hours. It’s light till 10 in the evening in the summer but the airfield is shut by 5.15pm.
• BS local procedures which means you spend about 3x as long studying local procedures than you do actually planning the route of flight
• BS indemnity procedures you have to follow if you want any chance to fly in out of the opening hours. Some – e.g. HIAL – require you to apply this by post and charge fees for this, and given Scottish weather, there’s a 70% chance you’ll not even get to use it before having to apply (and pay) again.
• PPR by telephone only, which can only be done during the airfield’s tragically short opening hours even if you were granted out of hours access. In fact PPR in general. Airfields in the US don’t need it, are we so much thicker than Americans we have to be hand held on the phone?

There are airfields free of this BS (e.g. I was planning to go to one today in Yorkshire which doesn’t need indemnities, or people there supervising, and is simply open sunrise to sunset and I suspect would be H24 if they had lights – unfortunately the person I was meeting was otherwise engaged) but unfortunately these airfields tend to be in the middle of nowhere with zero ground transportation (certainly a minimum taxi fare of £80 or so from the nearest town of consequence). There are a vanishingly small number of low-BS airfields that do have good ground transportation and useful opening hours (e.g. Blackpool, Ronaldsway, probably Prestwick – but I’ve not flown in there for a few years) and who don’t charge an absolute king’s ransom.

In the US, if it was a nice Friday shaping into a good weekend, I could simply go to the airport on the way home from work, pull the plane out, and fly somewhere. Didn’t matter where – if there was an airfield there, I could use it even if it was (shock horror) 8.30pm in the evening. Here? Nice Friday shaping into a good weekend – my only options that won’t break the bank really are Blackpool and Prestwick, maybe even Barton if I can sneak out of work early. Everywhere else will be closed before I even get out of work, or closed before I can possibly arrive, or has zero options for ground transport when you get there.

Pretty much everything else pales into insignificance compared to the embuggerance that so many airfields here subject us to. Even the cost compared to the US is only a minor annoyance in comparison. How anyone learns to fly here when most airfields are closed when people get out of work is amazing, and it’s no wonder so many new PPLs immediately give up.