What discourages European pilots from flying to the UK?

I don’t understand it either, but a Licensed Aerodrome is under a lot of control from the CAA. And there are some benefits to being Licensed e.g. the CAA can prevent a combative neighbouring landowner from growing fast growing conifers at the end of the runway. Or a property shark building houses there and rendering the airfield unusable. And that has actually happened, a day after going unlicensed (don’t remember the place).

Historically, the main reasons IMHO for limited opening hours are

• The CAA prohibited pilot controlled lighting. This was in place for decades, and the belief continued long after the guy who “owned” (and implemented, via FUD) the policy retired. In recent years it became known, via somebody carefully reading the regs, that PCL was in fact permitted all along but only at Unlicensed aerodromes. Accordingly, a number of private sites had it but kept it secret, without realising that they had not needed to There was a side argument that the original CAA policy (that the radio frequencies were to be used only for voice and not permitted for signalling) could be trivially circumvented by using SMS, for which many remote control solutions have existed for many years.

• Some % of pilots who land out of hours fail to pay the landing fee. The religious avoidance of even trivial fees (say £5-£10) is a rather British trait, driven by the main UK aviation chat site allowing certain regulars to call for boycotts of airfields on this basis. But for sure some people are simply dishonest and spoil the fun for everybody else.

Jujupilote wrote:

Ok let’s try Newquay EGHQ, which is friendly, fully equipped but much farther away ….GA handler closes at 6:30pm and asks for 40£ per extra hour. I don’t want to fly with a time*money commitment !

Was that the flying schol FlyNQY or the larger handling agent?

I would say the North Sea.

@Peter, thanks for the invite, I will keep you posted via Telegram. Sounds like a good Plan A.
@Jacko, i’d love to extend this trip to Glenswinton, let’s see how this develops.
@JasonC, I was referring to the friendly chaps of flyNQY. The other handler doesn’t advertise AVGAS, but maybe I could park there and then refuel via FlyNQY. I need to call them.

Jujupilote wrote:

@JasonC, I was referring to the friendly chaps of flyNQY. The other handler doesn’t advertise AVGAS, but maybe I could park there and then refuel via FlyNQY. I need to call them.

No FlyNQY are the best and cheapest. Don’t bother with Weston.

Jacko wrote:

the English are absurd with their stupid aerodrome opening times

And so are the Scottish. Look at the HIAL airports for instance. Oban – a superb airfield, but opens only bankers hours – and if you want to operate out of hours you have to apply in advance by post on a form you have to fill in by hand, and pay a fee that will probably go to waste as the weather will turn on the day you actually want to fly in and your short-lived out of hours permission will expire. And when you have this permission, you still have to on top of that call for PPR during their opening hours, so virtually all the utility of GA has been taken away (one of the nice things about GA is you don’t have to book stuff in advance, you can just go). Hours of perfectly flyable daylight is unusable if you’re at Oban.

While smaller private (farm) airfields tend to work SR-SS, the problem is they are miles away from anything useful.

I suspect the poor opening times of most useful airfields in the UK is a huge reason why people give up flying.

What there needs to be is a “Strasser scheme” for PPR and out of hours operation, a system which is provided free to airfields and pilots and funded by the alphabet soup of GA groups which is a one stop shop to get a national indemnity approved (so you don’t have to apply to every single airport for out of hours operation) and a one stop shop for PPR requests. It’ll never happen of course.

I though there was a HIAL overall indemnty scheme which does just that?

For just five airfields, which you have to apply by in advance only by post (with your credit card details in plain text) – and for only one aircraft so bad luck if you rent and aren’t guaranteed to always get the same plane, so no – it doesn’t really do just that, and you can still only PPR when Oban is open (in other words during bankers hours). No spur of the moment summer evening flights to one of those airfields.

(I meant Argyll and Bute, not HIAL, but the point still stands – many UK airports have pitifully short opening hours, and bureaucratic indemnity schemes (if available!) to be able to use the airfield outside these hours).

Terrible ATC, terrible airports , expensive to land not easa compliant terrible weather snob pilot culture.did I miss anything

liftvectorup wrote:

did I miss anything

Yes. The hi-viz Nazis.

I think this thread pretty much sums it up.