I believe the Gloucester PPR was partly down to try and cut down the RT congestion on freq so some arrival details were pre noted – certainly trying to operate a relatively fast twin there is often hard work with the variety of other traffic, and it only takes one (of the all too common) lot of dire RT from some GA pilot to clog the whole thing up. I found the whole Gloucester PPR mass hysteria reaction on one GA forum totally tiresome – most of us do a quick call anyway and it takes seconds. I’ve really got more things to worry about in life, and I don’t for one minute believe there are lots of pilots that just suddenly decide to land somewhere during a flight. As for boycotting somewhere because of it, well more fool them missing out on a great facility like Gloucester.
The public use of assets angle is interesting – I had some people telling me recently that military airfields should be open, free to GA pilots as they are ‘taxpayers, don’t you know’ – leaving aside security issues, I told them I’d look forward to parking my car free at the local police/fire station and hospital then this weekend 
I think the opportunity is in shared use of facilities – I’ve often flown to overseas airports where military/civilian/coastguard/commercial businesses etc.. have separate base installations sharing runway/ATC infrastructure and this could be a model to exploit some of the military airfield opportunities.
Balliol wrote:
most of us do a quick call anyway and it takes seconds
That’s not really the point: EGBJ doesn’t open till 9am on a weekend and I’m 2 hours flying time away. I have relatives in the area; if it’s a nice day and on the spur of the moment I would like to go there, I used to be able to make an early start and get a good day in there. Now it’s necessary to wait until at least 9am to be able to phone someone there which means the earliest I can be there is 11am (and after having to get a taxi then a train into Worcester, it’s gone lunchtime before I get to where I need to be).
If an airfield really does insist on PPR, they can at least offer an online method. If it’s to coordinate ATC then they can at least accept a flight plan in lieu.
No hard surfaced civil airfield in the USA requires PPR. Are we really so much dumber than the Americans we can’t drop this outdated requirement?
What have Gloucester said when you discussed your specific predicament to them? I am sure they have flexibility for out of the norm cases.
If one was doing it regularly, maybe, but you can’t discuss the subject when there is nobody there and you want to land early the next morning.
It is just completely dumb to have a “must use a telephone” rule. I cannot understand the logic here. If they have nothing happening, why not allow an inbound to land? ATC, along with just about everything else at an airport, all the way to the lavatory cleaner, is a fixed cost. What we now have is an airport where you arrive, with nothing going on, and they will refuse you because you didn’t telephone them. It is complete and total madness. Not surprising that this is in the UK, actually – the last refuge of blind obedience of rules.
Even “strictly PPR” Bournemouth didn’t turn away inbounds.
One could circumvent it trivially by making a satellite phone call. You can pick up a Thuraya 7100 phone and a SIM for a few hundred on Ebay. Might be handy if you do a forced landing 1000 miles from civilisation (mid Wales? ) Hey, it just happens that most bizjets do have a satellite phone 
Or you could message somebody on the ground to telephone them.
It is just too bizzare for words…
For years, people familiar with the place were saying that if the (then) present manager leaves, and the (then) obvious replacement takes over, the place will be trashed.
Balliol wrote:
I believe the Gloucester PPR was partly down to try and cut down the RT congestion on freq so some arrival details were pre noted
I agree RT is Europe could be streamlined and more emphasized in training. But it takes training, not mandatory phone call.
Of course you will call say Barra before going, but otherwise…
It decreases GA utility and so its attraction to newcomers.
Sailors don’t have to call harbours before going in right ?
Motorists don’t have to call highway companies to use them (they are private in France). You go and pay the toll, and if everybody has the same idea, you get stuck in traffic and can leave it if it makes you mad. That simple.
@peter have Gloucester “turned away inbounds”? Does anyone have any evidence or has actually spoke to them to discuss their needs / non usual cases? 99% of people have had absolutely no drama since the change so let’s not go down the other forum hysteria route…
Peter wrote:
One could circumvent it trivially by making a satellite phone call.
Actually, some places don’t like telephone calls from the air neither (by pax obviously )
I am talking places with zero RT chat on frequency, daylight stop, parked in a dump and no fuel uplift…
I understand things are obviously different at EGBJ with all training and mix of aircrafts especially on busy summer days but an online form could do the job?
Last time on another empty airport, I got an admin person reading a PPR text template that looked like T&C + AIP, still they were not unable to tell if fuel is available and which runway in use, so I did not felt the whole exercise was that useful after all…
Timothy wrote:
Or do we say that that the airfield infrastructure is a national asset, like airspace, and should be owned and operated by the State (as it is in many/most countries)?
I firmly believe in this. An airfield is not a business and should not be a business, it is infrastructure. Infrastructure needs to be built, organized and maintained by the state, and paid for by taxes and user fees (where applicable).
MedEwok wrote:
I firmly believe in this.
Actually, so do I; but how do we get from here to there? May or Corbyn, d’y’reckon? 
May or Corbyn, d’y’reckon
Well this is way off topic but I don’t think either Labour or the Tories are much suited to tackle the challenges facing the UK, and certainly not the questions of aviation infrastructure.
