It re-opened to GA a while ago.
Blackpool is to reopen as a GA-only airfield in 2015 too.
Galway Airport is to reopen next Monday, 5 January.
Some good news :)
I hear that a lot, but I don’t believe it. I see evidence to the contrary all the time.
That’s nice to hear and I really hope that it will change again in our part of Europe. Right now, it doesn’t look like it. I just read that the fire brigades of many small towns and villages are forced with closure due to lack of firemen. This duty has traditionally been fulfilled by volunteers.
And regarding volunteer work among pilots: When our flying school manager tried to implement a “kitchen duty” scheme in the flying school where every week a different student would operate the coffee machine and the dishwasher, quite a few of them plainly refused: “I want to become a pilot, not a kitchen aide!” With this kind of mentality among the next generation of pilots, I don’t see a bright future for non-profit aviation.
It may work now, but volunteers are a dying species.
I hear that a lot, but I don’t believe it. I see evidence to the contrary all the time. In my aeroclub there are constants complaints about member’s lack of interest in volunteering to run the club and the airfield — but in relation to the number of members I don’t believe the situation is any worse than it was when I started flying 30 years ago. The problem is rather that the private pilot population is going down.
Another example: In my home town there is a railway preservation society that operates a 33 km railway entirely with volunteers which do all work including maintenance. It has no staffing problems — there are even teenagers among the staff.
But on the other hand people might not do the same kind of volunteer work as they did 30 years ago. There is a lot of worry in Sweden that membership of most political parties is dwindling. (I assume the situation is similar in other European countries.) This is frequently taken as a sign of political disinterest in the younger generation. This is not true at all, but many young people now rather spend their time in various activist networks rather than established parties.
It is not only the UK that has the issue. The U.S. has faced a massive closure programme of GA airfields, and we often hold the U.S. up as the leader in the field. What happens there, invariably crosses the pond and replicates here.
I feel the issue here is primarily cost, a falling GA population, for several differing reasons, and a plethora of airfields all vying for a diminishing market base. For me, locality of the field is a major driver. I have been based at fields which are an hours drive away, and that reflects in the number of hours I fly. By the time you get there, weather has changed, you fly in the direction you have just driven 
I am in favour of GA Centres of excellence. The South of England has a number of these, which appear on the face of it, successful. However, I have just negated my argument of above regarding locality, but, IMO, it may be the only way the industry can stabilize and recover.
Housing is a real issue in the UK and it makes no sense to pretend it isn’t.
I would suggest that people, too many of them, are the root cause of the problem. No point in destroying the place in attacking a symptom, versus the cause.
But really, with about 40,000 commercial and non-commercial pilots in the UK, airfields aren’t really about connecting people. Not ‘average’ people anyway. Pilots, even poor ones, have invested a huge amount of energy and money into being pilots. Richer people would be better served by a helicopter anyway.
Your average intercity train probably has more passengers than all of GA in the entire country at any given point in time and probably has a higher cruising speed than most of the fleet. Whether that makes HS2 a good idea is another matter.
Housing is a real issue in the UK and it makes no sense to pretend it isn’t. I’m a medical doctor on a decent wage and couldn’t contemplate buying a decent house in large swathes of the country. I can see why airfields are so attractive, both economically for developers and for politicians who want to provide them.
None of which makes me support getting rid of them. Better to argue that they support business, air-ambulances and are often on flood plains.
It’s driven by government policy, a policy that is only interested in short term gains and sees no value in having a well-connected community.
The worst example is the proposed HS2, a new high speed rail link that will carve through villages and countryside but for which there is no sound business case. The line is not about connecting communities, it is about job creation and political egos.
At EDKV Dahlemer Binz they have a volunteer up at the tower and another one at the C-annex-cashier office on the ground floor, at least two volunteers on duty at all times. THAT works.
It may work now, but volunteers are a dying species. I am active in two non-aviation activities that are entirely dependent on volunteer work (one of them is the astronomical observatory in the town where we live) and it is more and more difficult to find people willing to sacrifice their spare time free of charge. Below age 50, almost nobody wants to do volunteer work any more, especilly the young generation has zero interest. We are a university town that has an astrophysics faculty, but for more than ten years, not a single physics student has volunteered to operate the telescopes for the public. I hear the same is happening at gliding clubs, some of which will have to close once the last volunteering pensioneer loses his medical.
