boscomantico wrote:
The issue that sometimes stops this from happening is that based GA does normally not pay these handling fees; they only play landing fees and local hangar / tie down rates and if they are reasonable, they have no reason to fleeExactly. This is the case at many airports, like Amsterdam, Maastricht, Geneva, Zurich, Buochs… to name a few.
ivark wrote:
I know that some people are actively looking for suitable land near tallinn
The trouble is that usually any land anywhere use near a big city is very expensive. So based and landing fees need to be sufficient to justify that cost, which means that there is no real saving.
arj1 wrote:
I think @ivark might know more…
Not really.. I know that some people are actively looking for suitable land near tallinn, but so far no luck. Indeed those rates don’t apply to locals- but its completely unclear for me how the “local” is determined. At least the manager at Tartu airport (which is a subsidary of EETN) told me that their bookkeeping system don’t really use the term “based aircraft” – for tiedown at EETU everybody pays the “visitor” fee- (they are both really low, abut 1EUR/day and maybe 0.9 for “based” aircraft). For tallinn, the regulation is very unclear. Yes, there is a paragraph saying that non-based aircraft etc. need to use follow-me car. Is that equal to “basic handling”- I’m not sure.I haven’t found a line about mandatory handling anywhere. When I landed in tallinn first time in my OY reg piper, I got followme and paid something for it, but certainly not the full amount of handling fee of that time. I also spoke to the president of our pilot union, he said that his aware of the new pricelist and complaints, but it seems that he does not especially want to touch the issue, to avoid the situation where the airport decides to end the inequality and start applying the handling fees to tallinn based planes also.
This is a remorseless trend in the Nordics…
Stockholm Bromma, Helsinki Malmi, now this…..
Whose next?
With that being the situation, I can hardly think of a city in Eruope that more desparately needs a small GA airfield to be created. Max 20km from the city (Rapla is to far away already).
I am almost sure that some people (from the small but existing local light GA scene in Tallinn) are working on it, but sometimes it can be difficult.
The issue that sometimes stops this from happening is that based GA does normally not pay these handling fees; they only play landing fees and local hangar / tie down rates and if they are reasonable, they have no reason to flee (Luxembourg is, or at least used to be an example). However, with that attitude of the airport, all the security, etc., I can’t immagine it being a pleasure having an SEP based there…
We requested a quote two weeks ago and all in it was closer to 700€. We decided to skip EETN and do Tallinn from Pärnu, EEPU instead. You need a Bolt car first to get into town and then it’s 1:50 on the bus, so it’s not very convenient. OTOH buses are frequent and well organized, you can book online. Moreover, there are lockers at the bus station to leave your luggage. A stroll in the pedestrian area of Pärnu and lunch in one of the sidewalk cafés was really nice.
What does Russia have to do with it??
Besides that; it‘s correct that the call for „AOPA“ in these small countries without any signifiant own light GA scene does not help much.
There is no AOPA in Europe. 1 or 2 countries have something which operates nationally. Only the US has a good one.
Russia was never cheap for foreigners. They rip everybody off; that and stealing is a national hobby. A round the world helicopter pilot I know spent $60k just flying an MD500 along the length of Russia, ~15 years ago.
It seems the handling fee alone comes with 510€ ! That sounds like a big rip-off, like in ex-USSR style… Can AOPA not take some action against such outragous fees? Do members get a discount?
