I fear there are bad news concerning Greece. They have implemented a slot system for GA. It affects almost all airports even the ones without traffic.
http://www.hsca.gr/images/SLOT%20REQUEST%20GUIDELINES.pdf local copy downloaded 2018
Level 3 is for the world’s most congested airports. Obviously nothing in Greece could be remotely considered as congested so this is yet another anti GA nonsense. Sitia has like 2-3 airplanes a day and it’s level 3. What a joke.
Indeed, what a joke. Greece is heading for the 3rd world step by step.
The most inconvenient aspect for pilots is that during the week, they want the pilots to apply directly, using that bloody GCR format that nobody understands. Would you be able to implement this into autorouter, Achim?
Also, I can’t remember having always received a specific parking number when I went to Greece. Now one will need that for the slot request, so one more thing to ask from the handler who issued the PPR.
Just cancel IFR at the end of the flight…
This is far from my bed – I am unlikely to fly so far in the near future, if ever at all. Still I can’t help wondering: what could be the reason? One could imagine local authorities are doing whatever they can to get more money from visiting pilots, and who could blame them? But as far as I understand this, they are only making life hard on potential visitors with (relatively) big purses. Why o why?
Still harder to understand they are apparently basing this on an IATA document – what has IATA to do with general aviation?
Then again, reading the document referred to, it seems to apply only to IFR flights and only at “IATA Level 3” airports. Leaving most mere mortals unaffected.
As from 6/07/2015, all IFR General / Business Aviation flights, scheduled to operate at
Coordinated (IATA Level 3) Greek Airports are obliged to request an airport slot for landing
and/or take-off from the Hellenic Slot Coordination Authority (HSCA).
Yes, but thing is that they put almost all airports into category 3!
Germany (worlds apart in terms of traffic) has only a handful of category 3 airports. This classification is indeed made by IATA.
http://www.iata.org/policy/slots/Pages/index.aspx
The lack of capacity in the airport system to cope with increasing demand is a major concern. There are over 165 airports formally designated as Level 3 (most congested, requiring slots), and this number is expected to grow significantly over the next five years.
Sitia is the biggest joke of all. The airport management was a complete joke before already. I would put it in the category -1: “least congested airport in the world, biggest gap between money invested for infrastructure and intelligent use of infrastructure”.
But it’s great to see that Greece has a world market share of 10% of the most congested airports! Little province airports like Berlin EDDB are not slot managed, buzzing places like Sitia are level 3. To be fair, on my 5 visits to Sitia, once I saw another airplane! And in LGIR (great airport actually) during one trip in the high season, I saw that 5% of the GA apron were used but you have to subtract the planes parked there that do not have engines.
I thought those slots were mostly about passenger/aircraft handling on the airport itself. You cannot handle more passengers/flights per hour than the capacity of the security check points, these kind of things. Thus, slot or not is not directly connected to the size or the number of flights/passengers per hour. A large and busy airport can be greatly overdimensioned, while a small/not busy airport can be lacking.
A good reason to fly VFR nonetheless
LeSving wrote:
A good reason to fly VFR nonetheless
That is indeed a good solution. Just perform a flight rule change before the airport and you’re good. It’s been done a lot in Germany for the slot coordinated airports (even though getting a slot is free of charge and easy) — we can see that in the autorouter stats. Given that the weather in Greece is usually nice in the summer, this is a good workaround.
Still it’s very sad to see this level of mismanagement. In addition to the slot (managed centrally), many airports require their own PPR on top of that.
AFAIK, passenger and landing fees in all Greek airports were securitised (I.e. they were sold forward for a number of years) a couple of years back. So the Greek authorities have strictly no incentives to facilitate movements, quite the opposite.
Of course this is very short sighted as it doesn’t take the ancillary revenues (tourism).
Petakas knows the detail (he is on holiday right now) but I don’t think this is correct. There is a long-standing proposal to privatise airports but it involves bundling them into groups, and within each group you have different sized airports. That would be done to prevent the new private owner closing down the small ones, obviously. The majority of Greek airports are there for the public transport infrastructure and don’t make any income which could be sold off. AFAIK only Athens, Corfu and Thessaloniki make enough money to be sold off alone.