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Air Navigation Services Terminal Charges in Germany

achimha wrote:

they realized that pilots started to cancel IFR just to avoid the € 4.20

You got to be kidding me they were actually so cheap as to cancel cause they will have an out of pocket expense of 5 Euros? A little more than .5 Lt of beer.

I have another scenario for you. They were doing what they always did ,when at the end of the flight it was VFR they cancelled IFR and went in VFR like they did in every similar circumstance at every other airport. Some airports charge for practice approaches some dont. EDMS dosent seem to cause I do know they didnt charge a pilot for doing so after asking if he was permitted to do one.

achimha wrote:

(and have probably even more people cancelling IFR to avoid it)

I dont understand if the airport is VFR then its VFR if its IMC (Instrument meteorological conditions) then how do you cancel an IFR flightplan and land as a VFR flight? I can understand why the airpot would be pissed the because the pilot broke the regs and it unsafe to boot.

KHTO, LHTL

I thought that aircraft under 2 tons MTOW were exempted

Only en-route charges are exempt if you are less than 2MT.

Approach charges are still payable.

In the UK for example this is billed by the aerodrome as the “navigation service charge”.

Last Edited by James_Chan at 08 Sep 10:27

C210_Flyer wrote:

I would prefer the city of Straubing swallow the fee. They are the ones most benefiting form the commerce that the airport generates. I do believe the airport should be revenue neutral with sufficient reserves for needed maintenance and upgrades but that is really not the topic of conversation here. If they just charge the M facilities they will just turn around and charge the customer.

That’s not how politics around small airports work. The airport has to wash its face, i.e. be selfsufficient to not give locals yet another reason to complain.
Your reasoning is logical in terms of economy but that is not how it is considered. Sad, but not easily changed. And I won’t go even further, because economic politics, let alone cross-Atlantic, are a minefield these days.


The airport is effectively break even with a loss carried forward and some subsidies they receive from public.
So there is no cash generating machine that you might assume from your regular approaches.

Last Edited by ch.ess at 08 Sep 10:41
...
EDM_, Germany

It’s all really simple. There’s a price list – and you can agree with it or not. Nobody forces you to fly there.

I gladly pay the € 5 to support the airport a little.

Will the city of New York pay my toll for the Hudson tunnel just because i will spend a lot of money in Manhattan?

Alexis wrote:

There’s a price list – and you can agree with it or not.

Yes and price list is mis-represented. Since you dont know the rules you can be caught off guards as what happened to me.

I was paying for fees I was not making for 6 months. I dont look at the fees charged because if I dont make an approach at any othet airport Im not charged and Im certainly not charged for and IFR Flightplan to any airport Ive ever been to except Straubing.

Even there I only found out by accident when one of the bills was returned to them for some strange reason and they physically gave it to me. I opened it up and remembered that the month in question it was VFR at the airport and Im being charged an IFR approach fee. So after having paid 6 months of approaches which I did not do and not being told they have a new policy which I find illegal since nobody else does that in Germany I argued the bill.

After a few more landings and complaints over the bill I finally told that "if you file an IFR flightplan to this airport EDMS we will charge an IFR (approach) fee " So nowhere is that stated in any of the guides or airport manual. They only have fees for IFR Approaches 5 Euros total.

Last Edited by C210_Flyer at 08 Sep 13:30
KHTO, LHTL

James_Chan wrote:

Only en-route charges are exempt if you are less than 2MT.

Approach charges are still payable.

In the UK for example this is billed by the aerodrome as the “navigation service charge”.

You seem to have a grasp on things. What you mentioned, that is exactly how it works in Germany minus EDMS and the 5 large towers run by DFS. So imagine if all of a sudden you file an IFR Flightplan and the aerodrome starts charging you navigation service charges when you arrive in the UK on a VFR flight after having cancelled IFR over Sweden once you got on top or out of your foggy home Swedish airport.

Sooo its the fact that they are doing this at EDMS and once the others see it working with people (PILOTS) excusing it and then that old expression “Monkey see monkey do” will come into effect and more and more airports will start instituting this new type of fee. Thats the IMPORTANT POINT not the 5 Euros its going to cost you. Hey, how did the handling issue come about? Were they all charging initially 100 Euros or more or did they start out gradually until now it between 150 -200 Euros at certain airports?

KHTO, LHTL

Alexis wrote:

I gladly pay the € 5 to support the airport a little.

I don’t gladly pay any aviation fee although I agree it is a good little airport. But now the surprise has passed C210, whether correctly or incorrectly described, you have a choice whether to go there.

This subject of the EDMS IFR fee is now ranking up there with the Cirrus is crap/great threads as the most boring on EuroGA.

Last Edited by JasonC at 08 Sep 13:57
EGTK Oxford

ch.ess wrote:

our reasoning is logical in terms of economy but that is not how it is considered.

Has anyone even attempted to point that out to them? In terms of efficiency. They can decrease personnel numbers by going electronic. Using Camersa for billing and having a self service pump as opposed to the inefficient system they have now. They turn it on for you in the office you pump and then go inside and someone takes your payment. Not self serve but with all the personnel of full serve.

Just saying if they need to decrease costs pretty obvious place to start.

Hey its a really nice airport, well maintained ,nice restaurant, nice motel, well maintained runways, taxi ways Hangars so no complaints there. There are lots of nice airports in Germany like that and they dont try the underhanded charging technique which they are doing.

KHTO, LHTL

C210_Flyer wrote:

Im certainly not charged for and IFR Flightplan to any airport Ive ever been to except Straubing.

There is an even better case — EDTY Schwäbisch Hall. If you just perform a practise approach on their ILS or LPV in VMC under VFR without a flight plan, they will charge you an IFR approach fee (> 10 € per approach) if you land or in case you do not land if they have your address on file! Right next to Schwäbisch Hall is EDTM Mengen which does the very same, only they don’t charge you if you don’t land because they don’t have sophisticated IT like EDTY. EDTY trapped me once because it’s a RMZ (radio mandatory zone) and I said “D-EXXX just checking ILS needles after maintenance” — a week later I had an invoice in my mailbox.

So two nice options for a Sunday excursion, including 30 min of arguing with the staff

They just want money and Germany is still a place where airports are very GA accessible and modestly expensive. Fly in the UK where you have to “book in” and pay significantly higher landing fees and you will gladly give those € 4.20 to Straubing even if their justification is a bit thin.

Sadly, many airports in Europe are not run for aviation but to create and support jobs.

These jobs are often the nicest jobs going in that part of the country, in the sense that they are great for lazy incompetent people (in very much th same way that communism was absolutely wonderful for them) and because whoever is funding it (with the most inefficient ones it tends to be the local chamber of commerce etc) has little or no clue about airports or aviation, there is little or no oversight and thus the job creation scheme is unlikely to be discovered.

And if it is discovered then the airport manager waves the “safety card” and the questioner has no option but to run away, because degrading safety is like proposing that convicted perverts should be allowed unsupervised access to children after 12 months of no complaints. Any re-evaluation of anything concerning “safety” needs the biggest balls in management and the authority to implement it, and even the biggest companies have nobody inside who is capable of this.

I have seen this in the UK too, and the result is that at some point the situation explodes and the funding agency (the local council) goes berserk (upon realising they had been hoodwinked all those years) and the airport gets hit with huge cost increases – because the old staff is still there and they will never allow their own positions to be affected. The airport gets offloaded to the first bunch of property asset stripping crooks who come along and take the council for a nice lunch and throw some telephone figures in the air.

Anyone who thinks I am being cynical should ask themselves why so many airports (especially in a particular country) don’t send out invoices and when they do they take a year (literally) to do so. The mentality behind that sort of “management” is impossible to grasp, for anyone who has even dreamed of running a fish and chips kiosk on the M25…

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