LDVA Varazdin reopening

Finally, after 8 months of being officially closed my base airport LDVA will reopen on November 4th with reopening party on November 6th.

It started with previous operator losing contract with municipality (the owner of the airport) and consequently airport losing licence. CAA simply stated old operator prevented smooth transition and the new one had to prepare all airport documentation as airport never had existed at all. To somehow ease consequences of their decision, CAA decided to allow operations to be done as “aircraft take-off and landing on natural land and water operating sites” for certain period of time to the operators that required that. However, after 3 months it’s started to be harder to get that approval and some operators got refusals.

From the very beginning I volunteered in helping preparing documentation facing from time to time with some strange requirements from CAA, very often stating that airport functioned in the past without supplying particular document but the new approval couldn’t be obtained without it. Also, they required extensive repairs of runway (in pretty good condition, better than some Croatian commercial international airport), apron (in good condition with few spots to be fixed) and taxiway (in perfect condition).

To make long story short:
- apron has been completely rebuilt (ground, beaten and resurfaced) and new tie-offs have been installed
- central part of taxiway (9 meters) has been rebuilt in complete length from apron to runway
- complete runway has been repaired, fixing the cracks (cutting, cleaning and filling with bitumen) and any sag
- horizontal signalization has been adjusted to comply with new airport manual
- new measuring of all coordinates, dimensions, slopes and signalization has been done (although everything remained as same as in the past, except two yellow lines at the beginning and the of runway required by CAA because of redefining RESA)
- new charts have been drawn from the scratch (although practically as same as in the past except those two yellow lines and new RESA)
- new airport manual with required charts, side documents and annexes has been written from the scratch

You can imagine waste of money for unneeded repairs, measuring known stuff and reinventing wheel with rewriting same documentation from the scratch. You can also imagine that repairs, measurement and drawing charts could be done only by authorized companies which made this waste of money even worse.

Working with CAA and Crocontrol (responsible for the charts approval) was pretty much interactive. It wasn’t possible to get consistent reply with complete information what had to be fixed in certain document before submitting correction from previous iteration. And then again and again and again… I stopped counting after fourth iteration. Something that was OK in May suddenly needed corrections in September. However, it’s over and I hope new operator will last more than previous one.

There is a lot more to do: fixing airport building, fixing hangar, reopening cafe and restaurant but the hardest part is over and aircrafts can freely operate again.