The aircraft was a homebuilt and I am not advocating anything. Apparently there was no suitable workshop at LGKR and it was suggested he take it to Megara for inspection/repair. In the end he thought it less hassle to take it back to Italy. As far as I know he had the engine inspected and has fitted another Hartzell propeller. I have not asked him about the circumstances, but I find it hard to understand how this could happen taxiing at a major international airport. A possibility is a brake failure. I’ll hear the whole story later no doubt. The prop strike did not stop the engine so I doubt they found any damage.
Simon
Anything is possible … A guy I know ran his Cirrus over concrete blocks at an Int’l Airport in Germay at night, shortened all three blades of the composite prop by about 2 inches … and flew home. “Well, there was a light vibration… but other than that it flew fine” Crazy and dangerous. Cost him € 70 K …
That’s really bad when you damage the airplane that far away from home … I hope that if I one day make a bad landing on an island the airplane is at least totaled … (new thread idea: How is airplane insured?)
simon32 wrote:
Greece has plenty of tourists, paying or otherwise, and the loss of a few GA pilots would not be noticed.
Indeed, that’s the key here. GA is simply irrelevant for the goals of the people involved. It is economically sensible to restrict it to a level where it does not have any negative impact on the scheduled traffic. There is not really a business case to be made — you won’t get the management’s attention by showing a plan to increase the airport’s revenue by 0.1%.
The best hope is dedicated GA places like Megara or Sitia and it’s a shame when those are badly managed. Sitia has less traffic than the smallest boondocks microlight grass field in Northern Europe but comes with pompous infrastructure worthy of a big city. Small GA places with reasonable fees and minimum services can attract visitors. Send all of those people for training to Portoroz.
Yes, completely irrelevant, and nobody there really understands GA. There’s simply no, of too little, GA tradition there.
Actually I thought about flying LGIR this week to visit wife and daughter who are there by CAT … but I am really turned off now. I’ll make a lunch trip to Portoroz or Losinj for fun …
Sitia has less traffic than the smallest boondocks microlight grass field in Northern Europe but comes with pompous infrastructure worthy of a big city..Yes INDEED…the pompous guy serving the AFIS was temporarily transfered to Kastelorizo LGKJ AFIS and when I managed to land in this dangerous-turbulent runway he came out of his box screaming-asking my documents.First and last ramp check of my whole life.We are talking for an island of 200 souls and 1 prop-regional every other day, wind permiting.
petakas wrote:
The fuel issue is another front and it has to do with how and if the fuel company is able to invest in new refueling hubs. Here’s their latest endeavor and we all hope it goes well. They do read this forum as seen here.
We certainly agree and sincerely hope it does go well. I also mentioned AirBP because they seem to be quite active in Europe with development of new facilities and as such it is in all our interests to support those efforts and give them our business.
Whether via this forum or direct personal contacts, it cannot hurt to suggest other locations where there could be opportunities, including self-serve facilities needing less infrastructure investment than was obviously made in Syros. A tank truck with a built-in card unit is all that an SEP/MEP needs for self-serve avgas, although clearly the usage needs to be (remotely?) monitored and the tank refilled when needed if availability is to be reliable. But the business case should be easier to make.
On my many trips to Greece I have found Greece to be fairly straightforward, largely because the handlers speak English, which makes a massive difference to some other places in the “near” southern Europe where they can’t (or won’t, to make a point).
Unfortunately Greece is now well screwed up for GA due to the Fraport takeover of so many airports. We will have to see what happens in the future. With nearly all costs being fixed costs, it isn’t in the airport’s interest to exclude traffic.
We still have Sitia as a really nice location which has not been “Fraported”, with customs and avgas. It is reachable from Croatia.
However this is all getting off the topic of Corfu LGKR. That used to be the main entry point for Greece and with the mad pricing they will lose most GA traffic – even if the €200-300 is only a part of the fuel cost of getting to Greece in the first place. I always found them OK. Olympic or Swissport Handling processed me in about 45 mins in Sep 2015, with the fuel truck driving up even before I shut the engine down. Obviously I pre-arranged all that via the handler (had to get to Bastia, Corsica).
Peter wrote:
Unfortunately Greece is now well screwed up for GA due to the Fraport takeover of so many airports.
LGIR is not Fraport operated but has gone downhill as a GA destination as well in the last 12 months. Much higher fees, a lot of red tape, difficult to obtain parking PPR despite empty GA apron, mandatory and expensive IFR slots, pointless complications.
Sitia has gone downhill as well with a pointless huge passenger terminal, inefficient handlers, ridiculous opening hours. At easter I spent over an hour with formalities, the passport check alone took 15 minutes (2 police officers, an EU+Schengen flight with nothing to check at all). Apart from an abundance of staff, there were neither customers nor any flights.
I am posting here my experience in Corfu LGKR
We had a landing gear issue at take off and re-landed there.
Fraport staff were friendly (within some strict administrative rules) and Goldair handling bent backwards to help.
Diagnostics took a lot of time and we had to bring in dozens of wood palettes to jack up the plane. Fraport let us do this.
After refilling hydraulic fluid and replacing a breaker we were helped out of the tricky CAA approval of the repairs and limped home.
Luckily my plane is N-reg so I signed off the refill of hydraulic fluid and replacement of circuit breaker myself. The CAA were happy with that.
All in all Fraport were a positive experience.
I believe that a dialogue with AOPA Greece should be possible with a positive outcome to improve the GA capabilities at LGKR.
Flyingfish wrote:
All in all Fraport were a positive experience.
I believe that a dialogue with AOPA Greece should be possible with a positive outcome to improve the GA capabilities at LGKR.
From your lips to Gods ears.
Ive given up on Greece altogether. This has been an exceptional year for me. Flying to Berlin via Air Berlin. Then flying to Kiev via Wizzair, Next week flying to Naples via Lufthansa. Pretty soon the for sale sign will be on the plane and back to the US it will go.
Why fight the trend if they dont want you, stay away. If I have to get my butt into a commercial airliner I might as well go to the Caribbean much much nicer not necessarily cheaper but better beaches for sure and diving is world class so is the sailing. By the way the fish you get there is really wild caught as opposed to the Med where just about everything is farmed. I might stick with soaring as a sport but not GA as a means of travel. Too bad now that Hungary and Austria has free flight. It just those damn avarice airports that are killing things. But now that I think about it a govt that charges almost 1.25 Euros tax on a Ltr of fuel is no help either. But I could be wrong on that last figure. By the way if your a commercial op why do you pay so much less for fuel?
