vic wrote:
Thinking about all that PPR nuisance that seems to be a big thing in UK, is there anybody there when you arrive at the airfield ?
At smaller airfields, quite often not. 90% of the time there won’t be a soul at Andreas for instance, and if anyone’s there it’s another pilot preparing to fly (or the glider club, on a Sunday).
vic wrote:
And who will cash the landing fees if nobody there ?
Have a card terminal in the C-Office? Works fine in Wangen Lachen and other places I’ve been to.
MedEwok wrote:
Someone who can call the emergency services in case of an accident is sufficient. This could be practically anyone.
In my opinion that is negligible difference. Someone has to be there while all over Europe people are landing at unmanned airfields and airstrips without any issues.
The clear motivation for an unmanned runway is to remove by far the biggest fixed cost.
I reckon that even if you have a mint condition hard runway and taxiways, grass cut to perfection, runway lights maintained to perfection (maybe not ICAO instrument runway standard 
), a GPS approach periodically test flown, toilets cleaned and replenished daily under a service contract, the salary and employment overheads of a single person (actually two just to cover daylight hours!) will still be the biggest item.
And if you employ volunteers, that’s great, but then you get the “volunteer problem”: “big characters” rise to the top of volunteer organisations (not just GA but in every other walk of life) and these tend to be people with loads of time who make friends and enemies in equal measure, which leads to the “ATC behaviour” so often described here. These people cannot be removed from the job without them making a huge stink all over the place, in revenge. And usually they cannot be removed at all because there isn’t anybody who can do it.
And a failure to recognise this cost issue simply leads to the airfield being on shaky ground, with it being only a matter of time before some accountant decides to close it.
I guess pilot honesty (payment of landing fees) varies by culture… but really it is dirt cheap to set up video surveillance which is in any case mandatory for security of whatever is parked there. Detecting landing aircraft automatically is accordingly trivial. 10 years ago I looked into a system costing peanuts which would email me a pic of the inside of a hangar whenever anything moved.
vic wrote:
Again, this is only to get no protests from neighbours by angry phone calls to the tower.
It’d be better if there was no-one there to answer the phone call, for what it’s worth…
vic wrote:
When you deal with unmanned airfields you will likely have to get PPR, no
No!
And most of these places will be private properties
Well, maybe. So?
or are there airstrips for anybody without asking ?
Yes!
There’s plenty of public, unattended airfields in France. In the unlikely event that they want to cut the grass or something else prevents you from being able to land, they publish a NOTAM, otherwise you’re free to land without PPR and without firefighters or anyone at the radio. I really don’t see the problem.
vic wrote:
So you asked for PPR the day before or some hours before ? I guess these are private airfields . And who will cash the landing fees if nobody there ?
For many small airfields in the UK, you’ll note the phone number given is for a mobile phone. The owner doesn’t need to be at the airfield to grant permission. There’s usually a box on the wall which you stick your £5 into, it’s an honour system. The occasional loss from a dishonourable pilot will be far less than the cost of a full time employee to collect the money.
More formal airfields will often have a web based PPR system, e.g. last time I went to Barton, I made my PPR request long after the airfield was closed the evening before, because I planned to take off from Andreas first thing to try to get to Barton before the circuit was full of student pilots (and my takeoff time would be before anyone would be at Barton to phone). The whole thing was automatic.
alioth wrote:
The whole thing was automatic.
Makes you wonder why you couldn’t automate it a bit more and just write “Everyone flying in tomorrow is welcome to land” on that website. Or turn it around and write “everyone is always welcome to land, unless we publish a NOTAM to the contrary”.
