But how can they legally ban it?
denopa wrote:
But how can they legally ban it?
Sure they can. They are not obliged to accept all traffic. Of course, they can’t discriminate in a way that prejudices proper competition – but Wingly aren’t in competition with the AOCs so that doesn’t apply. They also can’t discriminate on the basis of gender, sexual orientation, race etc – but again, not relevant.
Their airport, their rules.
Does Biggin run under a Public Licence or a Private Licence? Under the former you cannot discriminate against a specific operator (under a Private Licence, e.g. Goodwood, you can) so any block would be done via “ground politics” e.g. controlling hangarage. The aircraft basing situation at Biggin is tight, with most based owners over one barrel or another.
A Public Licence makes it very hard for an airport to exercise control over a rogue operator. They basically have to implement rules under which everybody suffers. This is what happened at Shoreham when one operator abused the out of hours concession.
Peter – the night surcharge at Southend is still £200 and applies from 2300 – 0600 Local Time.
I thought I‘d add it here. These are the 2019 charges for EGKB:
https://www.bigginhillairport.com/wp-content/themes/bh/images/bha-fees-april-19.pdf
Hence, for an SEP weekend visiting from Europe, with say 2 days parking will now work out to roughly 97 GPB, or about 115 Euros. (Assuming mandatory handling still doesn’t apply). Not a cheap endeavour anymore..
This is probably between 1.5x and 2x more, for a diversion and a few days’ parking before retrieving the plane.
Not really. Such flight would have been about 76 GPB before April 1st. So, not that huge an increase, but of course, 25% or so each year will make it very expensive sooner or later.
Biggin does not want to totally discourage small prop ops, but certrainly don’t want to attract it either. It’s the old problem of UK airports setting their fees as they wish, without any regulatory oversight.
With these fees in place, Southend (EGMC) is now definitely the less expensive option, even in the critical weight band of between 1.5 and 1.7 tons (most of the Cirrus/Columbia/C210/Bonanza crowd).
Yes; the issue, as always, is what the transport options are to where you need to be.
Biggin is less convenient than Southend for transport into London, though probably a little quicker. (Southend is a train door to door, 55 mins, Biggin is taxi or bus to Bromley South then a train; about 15mins+15mins, if the taxi is there on arrival.)
BTW, here is the 2019 table of fees and charges for Southend (EGMC). They just sent this to me via mail, with no further notes. No idea why they did such a crude document for 2019…
The thing is that historically, Southend always put all aircraft below 1.5 tons into the “1 tonne” category. I guess that is still the case…
