How many years until they become another Farnborough?
Another sad news for sure. It seems in SE England it is either bizjets only or house-building.
The reason of conflicting trafic is bullshit, their procedures are at fault. Go do a internship at KVNY TWR if you want to know how much light and heavy trafic can be blended.
Reportedly the airport management chucked out the schools just two days before they got planning permission to build a hotel on the EFG site.
One would imagine the school had lots of notice because planning applications are public, but they probably could not quite believe it was real.
It’s a bizzare way to run a business, even by airport standards.
Hypothetically, if the owners of said flying schools who’ve presumably had to move to another airfield now decided to conduct all of their trial lessons somewhere around ALKIN (i.e. criss-crossing their ILS in class G). How long would it take before their ‘corporate clients’ decided it was easier to just fly into Farmborough / Northolt? Would that come before or after the CAA either started asking tough questions about poor airmanship or at the very least managed to setup some real protected airspace for their ILS?
It’s another serious disaster – entirely caused by UK private airport operation that could have been postponed, prevented or mitigated with sufficient regulation.
Unless the UK government takes a look into these issues seriously, the UK’s light GA scene will only face extinction (eventually), in my opinion.
The departure of the last flying school could pave way for mandatory handling by $$$ignature Aviation.
This move seems so astonishingly vindictive and unnecessary. I wonder what the full story behind it is?
For example I recall that there was one man at Biggin (or one company?) which did something that caused the local council to re-assess the business rates for the whole airport, and everybody’s costs went up a lot.
Something has happened because the main school has just posted this on FB:
That’s good news.
Just saw this article: https://www.aviationpros.com/press_release/12430193/london-biggin-hill-announces-development-of-light-aviation-centre
Can that be seen as good news that “light” general aviation can and will continue to stay at Biggin?
Sounds like they are trying to tidy up the place, which always seemed to be half full of half bankrupt businesses (not to mention dodgy stuff like some hangarage company demanding they also do your maintenance) while starting one flying school so the profit goes to the airport.
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