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How can an airport just close to GA for a couple of months for no reason? (Scilly Isles EGHE)

WTF. Beats me. Practically every airport in North America is open 24 hours a day, all year long. Most are unattended. If you get stuck it is your own problem.

Airports are for airplanes, I just don’t get it when people ‘close’ them for various unnecessary reasons…

Sans aircraft at the moment :-(, United Kingdom

UK AOPA doing something about this scandal? You have to be kidding…

Notam still there:

L8672/19 NOTAMN
Q) EGTT/QFALT/IV/NBO/A /000/999/4955N00618W005
A) EGHE B) 1911150909 C) 1912301730
E) NO PARKING AVAILABLE FOR NON-BASED GENERAL AVIATION AIRCRAFT DUE
WATERLOGGING
CREATED: 15 Nov 2019 09:23:00
SOURCE: EUECYIYN

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

alioth wrote:

It’s the non-availability of airfields that will finish off GA – not issues with fuel, running costs or the regulator. Is it any wonder that most PPLs give up when confronted by these issues?

Absolutely right! Airports must be treated as public infrastructure, open to all users, whenever possible. Same as roads. And like roads, they do not necessarily have to “pay for themselves”. Infrastructure does not need to generate money!

Low-hours pilot
EDVM Hildesheim, Germany

As another Canuck, I tend to agree with @Canuck.

This varies hugely from one country to the next in Europe, and is largely due to culture/mentality/history. First, many countries don’t really have an aviation culture, and if they do it is very much in the context of the specific country political environment and mentality. In other words, the aviation culture is formed or limited by the national mentality.

E.g France: There are lots of quirks related to flying in France, but there are hundreds of airfields with essentially no limitations. Published opening hours are in many cases just AFIS hours. One can still use the airfield 24/7 if it has lighting, or during HR if not. Many airfields have IAPs (incl RNP) in G airspace without any limitations for their such as active tower or AFIS. In many ways, this is similar to North America.

Last Edited by chflyer at 24 Nov 22:14
LSZK, Switzerland

@chflyer, that´s why I want to brush up my French again. France really seems to be a nice place to go flying in Europe. It´s not California, but it´s within an hour flight time from home.

EDFE, EDFZ, KMYF, Germany

Imagine how much money you could save if you just shut it for good!

There is a PPR 250m farm strip at Tresco for the Super Cub/Maule fraternity.

Oxford (EGTK), United Kingdom

Imagine how much money you could save if you just shut it for good!

Unfortunately this principle is operated quite widely in the big corporate world. A company has a Purchasing Dept which costs them 1M a year. They have 1000 suppliers. Some smart “management consultant” (with an MBA and greased-up hair) produces a report saying that reducing the # of suppliers to 100 would save them 900k. Can anyone see the problem? So, they implement this, and the only practical way is to purchase the stuff they used to get from the 900 suppliers via a “procurement company” (these are now springing up everywhere, obviously, like rats). This company tells them they can bend over a barrel and screw these 900 suppliers really well and get really good pricing, so there is no extra cost to their client. Hmmm… they actually can’t and the client ends up paying “cost plus” and generally 10-20% more. I deal with this every day at work. In reality it is the “big company” that is over a barrel because they need the item and can’t get it.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

The UK seem to unfortunately lead the way in operating airports as highest-possible-profit infrastructure. As some said above, other airports have the same constraints so this behavior could extend to the rest of Europe.
Who bring the money ? How much does it cost to welcome other traffic (GA) ? All airports work the same way.
The scheme ends to the greek island syndrom : open just during CAT/business traffic, locked down otherwise.
Maybe the greeks were ahead of their time

This threat is in fact very critical for GA. If you can’t go anywhere, it completely looses its point.

The practice approach thread is connected. If you can’t fly approaches for practice, soon you won’t be able to fly approaches at all.

Edit : if, someday, GA A to B flights were prohibited (only local flights allowed), I am afraid not a lot of people (and more importantly, public voices) would be ready to fight. And we wouldn’t be audible.

Last Edited by Jujupilote at 25 Nov 12:28
LFOU, France

Jujupilote wrote:

not a lot of people (and more importantly, public voices) would be ready to fight. And we wouldn’t be audible.

Absolutely. I have been saying this for years. We can shout, expostulate, stamp our feet and cry into our beer, but we have no real power or influence whatsoever.

We are, just at the moment, lucky in the UK to have a Transport Minister who is very pro GA (he is an IFR pilot with a PA32 (or maybe PA28, I forget)) and in his few weeks in office so far has done great things for us, but that could all come tumbling down in three weeks time, in which case we will probably be hung out to dry.

EGKB Biggin Hill
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