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Why not a Europe map with GA 'friendly' airfields?

I think a website where one could leave feedback on GA friendly airfields so others can plan their European trips would be very useful.

Does this exist?

Peter...Why not on this website?

I lived in N. America for five years and airnav.com was really useful for researching trips. We need something similar.

I am spending way too much time looking through old trip reports trying to make a list of good airfields to stop at!!!

Regards, -Jason

Great Oakley, U.K. & KTKI, USA

Sounds like a good idea. I have seen something like that before where visitors rated food, runway condition and friendliness of staff (or along those lines) and while subjective, it was quite useful in deciding whether to visit somewhere.

There are some sites like that, and I am sure others will post the URLs.

From what I recall of them, however, is that the reports were very sparse, which is perhaps to be expected for European GA where most flying is very local in nature.

This is one of my pet "topics" to moan about. It should be really easy to find out what an airport offers, the pricing, etc.

The AIP is a start but won't list prices, so if you look at the AIP for some airport you see what you need to do, you fly there and then get a €700 bill.

I think the situation is slowly improving, with more and more airports setting up a usable website, but even today most GA-accessible airport websites are useless, and one has to email / fax / phone the place.

It's an interesting idea for EuroGA to set up a structured airport (ICAO) code based database. Let me speak to David.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Good idea. Just need to persuade all the adventures to post on it. :-)

Always looking for adventure
Shoreham

The UKGA website has this sort of information provided by its members.

jxk
EGHI, United Kingdom

Interesting, but what is the definition of "GA friendly"? I bet a glider or microlight pilot will look for something completely different than a self-flying businessman (who wants to spend the least time possible at or around an airfield) or a bizjet pilot who is forced to spend the best part of his day there but does not have to pay the bill himself ...

EDDS - Stuttgart

Fully agree to that, what_not, Peter and myself are at opposite ends of this scale - very few aerodromes can more or less please both of us. And then Peter's flying is generally purely recreational, or so I read his trip reports.

And also: there is nothing difficult to setting up such a webpage, and indeed there's a good number of them around. The hard thing is to get people to fill the database, not everybody has the motivation to write extensively about their experiences. As most of us are active on more than one forum, or so I presume, I see little advantage in creating yet another such website, it would only spread the rare resources (=pilot's practical info) over more targets, thereby reducing the value of each.

A disadvantage of most of the existing pages is that they're limited to a single country, or at least strongly focus on a single country - eddh.de is a striking example, I think - whereas this forum has been pan-european from day one.

EBZH Kiewit, Belgium

I think there is still some merit in trying it on here. I have flown to something like 70 different airfields, of which 60 are in the UK and I regularly try to add new ones my log book (take Charlton Park last weekend). My little trips don't warrant anything more than a few words and maybe a few pics, whereas Peter and Jason and a few others are certainly touring more and are worthy of their longer reports, but I'd happily give my review. And it would potentially attract even more people here. Invariably when I have spotted a little unlicensed airfield and type "airfield name" + "review" into Google, here in the UK, invariably a UKGA hit will be at the top of the Google list.

Of course they are worth what people are paying to view them, but a positive review, is a positive thing for that airfield as well, and airfields need as many outsiders popping into support them - though I suspect Lord Suffolk down at Charlton Park gets by OK on his own means ;-)

I am all for this. Not because such sites don't exist (there are loads of them, though many like the UKGA one are miniscule and in that case very UK-centred) but because here on EuroGA we have a very unique pan-European community.

It all started with me emailing, last year, about 3000 pilots who I had emails with since 2001. Since I started my trip writeups in 2003 this correspondence took on a very European flavour and this has directly resulted in the community we have here. No other pilot site has anything like that.

So I think it would be a success.

As regards opposite ends of the scale, Jan, all this means is that the database would need to be configured so that all the various parameters are included. Different pilots make decisions on different criteria. For example I would want a field describing the quality of taxi and parking surfaces. A TB20 is perfectly fine for grass but if there are 5" potholes, you are looking at a £30k repair job. But (and yes this may sound cynical) a renter might not even think about that. When I used to rent a PA28-181 I used to fly to any runway which was long enough. Not because I didn't give a **** about breaking the plane (though that is true for some people) but because nobody at the school I did the PPL at told me anything about operating a plane. One TB20 pothole prop strike later, I am a lot more careful...

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Interesting, but what is the definition of "GA friendly"? I bet a glider or microlight pilot will look for something completely different than a self-flying businessman (who wants to spend the least time possible at or around an airfield) or a bizjet pilot who is forced to spend the best part of his day there but does not have to pay the bill himself ...

The joy of computers is that you could have the same database, and a microlight/class-A/bizjet pages. Or individual pilots could enter their own information (cost sensitivity, minimum t/o distances, acceptability of grass etc...) then see a personalised page showing only the airfields that would be of interest to them.

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