How much support are people looking for on a fly-in / how to make fly-ins work

Some good points – thank you.

There are two aspects being mentioned here. One is publicising a fly-in, and the other is (my original Q) how much organising people expect.

On the former, if people aren’t going to keep an eye on the Trips and Airports section (and many people who read the forum regularly do read only one section) they aren’t going to keep an eye on any other type of site – unless an automated email is sent to the whole (or a subset of) membership every time somebody posts their plans. Or a daily digest, etc. And that is a bit impractical, especially with e.g. gmail dumping a large % of automated emails. Daily or weekly digests might be something to consider anyway for EuroGA – that’s another topic and I will start a thread on that.

On the latter, it doesn’t look like we have strong support for a highly organised event. That suits me fine since I would probably end up doing it

It didn’t occur to me that having a “destination voting website” was a major factor. We did this for La Rochelle (David kindly wrote some custom code for it) but not many turned up to that fly-in. This was partly due to somewhat dodgy VFR weather but also from comments I got later nobody from central-ish Europe would fly to La Rochelle as it wasn’t “central” enough The vote was also a waste of time because it became obvious afterwards that most of the people who voted for La Rochelle were never in a position to fly there (or probably anywhere else, frankly). That said, La Rochelle is a really super destination for a fly-in (one of the most scenic in France and the airport ticks all the boxes); we just aren’t going to get many (any?) central Europeans going there. It is about as far away as you can get, apart from the UK which has so few “scenic” locations suitable for a 2- or 3-day fly-in that personally I cannot think of any!

The Slovenia-Croatia-Greek fly-in was widely discussed in the Trips/Airports section at the time, which only brings us back to an emailed digest being the only way to go there. But I got the impression that most people who were in a position to fly there (or even to Portoroz – the first place) were aware of it. I guess we would have had more people coming to Venice (because “Venice” is “romantic”) and I dropped that only due to the film festival. Well, a few pilots emailed me to say they won’t do grass.

This follows a bit from here – speaking of a fly-in to Greece.

The feedback I had in the past was that very few would do it – it is perceived as too far and too complicated. Well, the distance is what it is; the “complicated” bit isn’t true unless you do something quite odd. In September 2015 a number expressed interest but in the end nobody went (apart from me in the TB20, with Dublinpilot). The furthest other was one pilot who got down to Brac LDSB.

One pilot has just told me that the casual meet-ups we do are no good for trips like this and that we would need to do a “travel agency” approach i.e. do briefing/planning packs, and obviously charge a fee for that. Cirrus Germany are doing a trip down there, to Kalamata which has no avgas, so obviously a lot of organisation is going into that and the fee will be substantial (either up front or in the fuel price).

It’s always been my view that the many “going places” pilots we have here already know how to plan a flight from A to B. But maybe we would get much bigger turnouts anywhere (not just Greece). I know of other past efforts in this area. For example one UK site did a fly-out from the UK to Germany, some years ago (yes, really, UK to Germany!). Massive assistance was provided, just short of flying to Germany in a formation They had a big turnout but AFAIK the exercise was never repeated – I think the one guy behind it was exhausted.

Some things are however fairly easy. One could produce a pack of stuff including enroute strip charts (VFR or IFR), airport plates (AIP or Jepp), etc. Actually I did that for some past meet-ups; emailed or dropboxed to known participants.

But the next step – booking hotels – is difficult. It’s a lot of work for somebody, and to reduce the % last-minute dropout rate (about 50%) one needs to charge a few hundred € deposit.

Views?

I don’t want to post much so as to avoid prejudging what others want to say, but it must be stating the blindingly obvious that with booking.com / airB&B and with serious flying A to B being virtually impossible without using the internet, getting hotels sorted out to one’s liking (and that will vary hugely between people) cannot be an issue in the present era.

The reason why charging an attendance fee like €200 (that’s the Cirrus one, I am told – it was instigated by one of the two SR22 owners in Greece) apparently results in a much higher turnout must be something less obvious, and maybe more “psychological”.