The pooleys plate is available on skydemon
Yes – this is brilliant news.
If this place had been anywhere near where I live (it is about 1.5hrs’ drive) I would have been there in a flash and making the landowner an offer, years ago. I have known about it for years and often wondered why somebody doesn’t chuck some money at it and do it up. As has all of GA in the south of the UK, but commitment and cash are a scare commodity; plenty of people spend 100k on a car and 500k on a plane but won’t spend say 200k on securing themselves a base 
£20 will rule out most UK burger run traffic, purely on principle. It’s the way it is… no point in trying to rationalise it. £10 is the upper limit. Also most schools/clubs will not allow most people to fly there because the runway is slightly short
But I am not sure the guy is looking to make money just from straight visiting traffic. Sufficient traffic even at £20 a time to pay someone to sit there and take landing fees would also cause complaints, and probably accidents → more complaints. For a gliding club it will be ideal.
Bosco is right about the utility value. It’s not a really nice area and the road connections are bad, due to the distance to the A27. But some people will fly there. A lot of pilots have a parent in a nursing home near there (like I had)
There used to be a derelict building next to it, but in recent years it was removed. Normally such a thing is very valuable, to turn into a hangar, with less work to get the planning permission (automatic right needs the roof to be intact, I understand).
Would i be correct in thinking that hangerage in that part of the UK is as good as none existent? How much would you pay to hanger say a C172 at say Goodwood? What about parking an aircraft outside on grass I bet that still costs a fortune.
If he could permission and build some hangers than I think he would be onto a winner. Lets face it most private owners don’t fly that often. So wont generate that much noise.
Gliding club wise I bet they will use something quite like a eurofox to aerotow rotax powered and would burn forecourst mogas as well.
I am sure many Goodwood based pilots are reading this, but I am equally sure the answer will be “political” like it is in most places…
The problem with hangarage here is that the business rates alone tend to translate to around £300/month of rental, give or take, per small aircraft. I did this exercise in 2005 and the min rent was £500/month (there was some ground rent). So, this policy for local govt screwing “industry” as hard as they can means pure hangarage is a marginal business proposition.
People with nice planes would pay £500/month however IF they can carry out freelance engineer maintenance in there, because the latter is a big payback.
Peter wrote:
£20 will rule out most UK burger run traffic, purely on principle. It’s the way it is… no point in trying to rationalise it.
I suspect the intent is to discourage power traffic but not rule it out entirely. £20 landing fee and £300/mo parking outdoors (no mention of hangar!) is an awful lot for an airfield with basically no services at all, not even fuel – in other words poor value for money. That’s more expensive than keeping your plane in a hangar at EGNS. It’s more expensive than Gloucestershire, which has fuel, full ATC, hire cars available on the airfield, café etc. But note the charges are perfectly reasonable for anything to do with gliders (an aircraft with a tow hook gets to go there free of charge, and motorgliders are only £5, and you can park your glider trailer there for £30 a month even though a glider trailer doesn’t use 1/10th of the space of a SEP).
Since it’s principally a glider club I can see where they are coming from – power traffic can be a pain in the backside to deal with on a busy glider launching day, especially if you’ve got the winch out and the powered aircraft pilot isn’t familiar with gliding operations, so while they probably don’t want to exclude all power traffic they probably want to discourage the “burger runs”.
No winch launching according to the website.
Frequent power traffic is still a bit of a pain for a glider club even with aerotow only. We’ve often pushed the glider and tug off the runway when someone has announced they are on final, only to discover they are flying a B747 length final in a microlight.
The land was for sale for development for some while last year. There were significant access issues and I can only assume that limited its commercial viability which, with another hat on, was a jolly good thing. It is great to see the airfield in use again, and I wish them the very best. I am not sure there is a vast amount of interest in the local area from the point of view of visitors with intent beyond the airfield but the golf course is well worth a round.
