Actually I reckon that if Europe had an ILS runway next to every decent size city (I mean not just London but say Brighton) which was open from 6am to 11pm, it would completely transform the situation.
This has come up before but AFAICS not in this thread. You can’t fly on business if your base opens 9am and closes 7pm. It’s immediately obvious that the longest distance you can fly at say 150kt, and where a time saving is made over driving there, is going to be … ahem … a square root of minus zero! There are just some rare cases e.g. south-east to north Wales in the UK which is a real bastard to drive, or to northern France, but there is very little commercial activity in either place.
In many years’ time LPV may change the first aspect but the opening hours are directly linked to the fixed costs of the airfield and in most cases the opening hours already are set by e.g. legally required ATC shift patterns and to spread them at all would mean recruiting more people. In the absence of unmanned towers (which implies a taxpayer funded remote approach controller) this problem cannot be cracked.
AdamFrisch wrote:
But we can’t compare personal air travel to the cheapest Ryanair ticket where you get treated like a dog and dumped 120km from the city you actually want to go to (at some old godforsaken ex-military airport with cheap landing fees). You should compare it to: a business class ticket where you’d have to stay an extra 2 days in a hotel, rather than doing it all in a day in your own plane.
But that’s not what I was saying, was it?
I don’t even want to get into the RyanAir argument (which would begin by pointing out that they now fly more and more to and from more central airports because they’re exactly aiming at that business clientele we are talking about). I won’t fly with RyanAir for work (yet). I fly economy and frankly, flying business on a domestic or short-haul European flight is utter nonsense and only exists to make people feel important, but I fly decent airlines. I fly them often enough to take advantage of their frequent flyer benefits – that means virtually no queues ever and food and drinks the lounge (I admit that the dinner at Lufthansa’s business lounge in Heathrow is one of the best meals I have in a week. I’m not a good cook). Anybody who travels enough to even consider a GA airplane for business trips is going to fly as much, so this is what you should compare it to.
I don’t buy the 2 extra days in a hotel argument. If I were so inclined, I’d get up at 07:00, take say an 08:15 flight from Düsseldorf to Hamburg, get a rental car to get to, say, Lübeck and I’m there an hour before lunch. In the evening, I take the rental car back to the airport in Hamburg and take an 18:00, 19:00, 20:40, … whatever I need flight back home and I could be home for dinner. Sure enough, Lübeck would have a nice airport to fly my SEP into, but it’s not going to cheaper and it is only marginally quicker and I have to worry about their horrible opening hours since RyanAir, WizzAir and the likes have abandoned the place in favor of Hamburg’s airport (see above). It’d be ten times as much fun to self-fly, but that shouldn’t be a factor in a business decision, should it…
This more of less works for any destination within Germany and heck, central Europe, apart from some small islands and some mountainous areas, which I happen to rather visit on holiday (and that’s where the GA aircraft has real utility) than for business.
what_next wrote:
Sorry, this is getting really political now, but I have to answer… If you take a large loan/mortgage from your Swiss bank to buy a house for yourself and don’t send them your monthly payments for two months in a row, you will get evicted from your house, the house is going to be sold at auction and you will still owe your bank the difference between your lohn an whatever they could sell it for. In this case here, the EU has not waited for two months to take action and not for two years either, but for two decades.
I just cannot resist…
But after that, you will declare personal bankruptcy, and after some time the remainder of the debt is discharged. Allowing business and personal bankruptcy has replaced having people in workhouses. Pre-Euro, countries could default “softly” through devaluation (without technically being bankrupt) or by defaulting on their bonds. The real issue is that this has not happened in this case.
There are just some rare cases e.g. south-east to north Wales in the UK which is a real bastard to drive, or to northern France, but there is very little commercial activity in either place.
Additionally to that, those kinds of places often have a subscription, so to say, for bad weather (which is why few people want to live and work there…). Even if there is some non-precision approach the chance of getting in is 50/50 which is not good enough for a business trip.
Reminds me of my one and only self-flown business trip… In the mid 90ies I was freelancing in engineering/IT. The company I was working for had developed some specialised software for a client in Rostock (a federal agency actually) and I was supposed to go there with a fully configured unix workstation and one of their employees, install it on site and train the users. The roads in that part of the world were even worse than as they are now and the original plan was to drive there on day one, do our work on day two and drive back in the night or early on day three. Three days for two people, hotel, expenses. As I was co-owning a Piper Seminole then I had a smart idea and proposed to do the whole trip in one day by flying myself. We agreed on sharing the money they saved that way so that at least part of my flying expenses were covered. So early in the morning I flew from EDDS to EDSB close to which the company is located. We loaded our computer on board and together with my colleague (who had a great time handling the controls) we flew towards ETNL. And guess what? Thick fog, visibility 100m, vertical visibility zero. Unforcast… The closest alternate with flyable weather was Lübeck. So we had to hire a car there, load our stuff drive 6 full hours through eastern German potholes and instead of being at the costomer site at 10 in the morning we arrived at three in the afternoon. Just enough time to unload our stuff before they (being a federal agency) turned off the lights at four. So staying overnight, do the job next morning, driving back to Lübeck for 6 hours in the afternoon/evening, fly back to Karlsruhe to drop the colleague and onwards home. All at my personal expenses of course. And this was the end of my entrepreneurial business flying 
all the following trips we did by car and I charged them every single hour and every penny of expenses…
what_next wrote:
That was the bad mistake, not the “evil” measures which are taken now.
I agree. And even before that, letting them join the Euro even though it was clear they were not fit for it. Why I wonder? Honi soit qui mal y pense…
Patrick wrote:
I don’t have to hide that I’m flying from anyone.
Well, I don’t either but I did get quite some flack over the years. Well, can’t take a “joke”, should not have opened your big mouth I keep telling myself. Then again, that is one reason why GA is so much of intellectual no-man’s land for many, because not enough people talk about it.
Patrick wrote:
but traveling SEP alone in comparison to airline/rental car/car/high-speed train? Illusionary!
Depends. Let me tell you, on my mostly flown route ZRH-SZG and return my Mooney will beat the airlines time wise and money wise most of the time. And not to compare apples with coconuts: I am talking daytrips, morning up, evening down with a decision to go 2-3 days beforehand. Usual tickets are 500 Euros plus (per leg) and travel time 3-4 hours each (via Vienna) The Mooney does the trip in 1.25 and costs less than 1000 Euros return.
Greece was admitted into the EU on the basis of manipulated economy figures. Other members are not responsible for that.
what_next – indeed, but in the USA both runways would probably have an ILS (later LPV) and be open H24.
And fog is really rare, in % terms. I recall some regional twin TP operation in the UK which like all (?) of them is not CAT3 which worked out that fog cancels only of the order of 1% of flights. It was the same historically for 737 ops, until CAT3 became common because (a) the manufacturers deliver it as standard and (b) ops like Ryanair force the airport(s) to upgrade to a CAT3 ILS “or else”. Fog is nothing new; airlines everywhere coped with it, because the % is so low.
Greece was admitted into the EU on the basis of manipulated economy figures. Other members are not responsible for that.
Let’s say you are a poor olive grower and earn €10/week and I offer to lend you €1M. Your eyes light up because everybody in your family can buy a Porsche Cayenne. You submit a fake statement of your assets, showing them as 50k when they are actually 5k. And everybody and their dog knows you earn €10/week and you are worth 5k. And facilitating the €1M loan to you will earn me 50k in fees. I am not complicit in your subsequent misery? I syndicated the loan, so are all syndicate members dumb old ladies who read the Daily Mail?
Of course Greece is responsible for its misery, but others are too, because everybody and their dog knew that Greece could never repay the money. Lots of corruption took place, in Greece (where it is normal and again everybody and their dog knew it) but also among the German (and other) equipment vendors who paid the bribes. Google Siemens bribery etc and you will read for hours. And half the stuff Greece spent the € billions on came from these firms. Submarines, anyone? But even without any corruption, lending that money to a borrower who so obviously cannot repay it was utterly irresponsible.
Which takes us back to inevitable pressure having IMHO been put on Greece to flog its assets to Fraport and others, which is still off topic on business travel in Europe, but probably on-topic for flying to Greece for those with € hundreds to blow on Fraport fees, and that assumes Fraport improve the airport facilities and not just skim the revenue which is great right now because of problems in Turkey.
…submarines…
At least Greece has the best non-nuclear submarines in the world. That’s better than nothing. Not even the German navy bought them because they are so insanely expensive
I just come back from buying a bottle of Cognac at Nice airport. Our customer whom we will take to Switzerland tonight called and ordered a specific brand to treat his guests/customers/whatever they are on the trip. 350Euros I paid with crew discount. A good reason for the entrepreneur not to fly himself but charter a bizjet instead, because he surely does want a glass of that stuff himself. At the same shop they had a bottle for 30000 Euros which would buy you a flyable Pa28. Crazy world.
I must say I am suprised Adam still hasn’t given up under this barrage of arguments why owner-flown aircraft aren’t a sensible for many (not all) European business.
From what I recall we mentioned so far:
Did I miss something?
AdamFrisch wrote:
But we can’t compare personal air travel to the cheapest Ryanair ticket where you get treated like a dog and dumped 120km from the city you actually want to go to (at some old godforsaken ex-military airport with cheap landing fees). You should compare it to: a business class ticket where you’d have to stay an extra 2 days in a hotel, rather than doing it all in a day in your own plane. Then all of a sudden that SEP trip is cheap compared. Especially if you bring a colleague along.
It can be, not always. I gave one example above where it is. Actually, the best “economy” of such trips is <500 Nm for most small airplanes and to and from airports which do not have direct flights from where you want to go. Under such conditions, even economy tickets can be viciously expensive especcially for daytrips.
Peter wrote:
Actually I reckon that if Europe had an ILS runway next to every decent size city (I mean not just London but say Brighton) which was open from 6am to 11pm, it would completely transform the situation.
Yep.
Peter wrote:
to flog its assets to Fraport and others, which is still off topic on business travel in Europe, but probably on-topic for flying to Greece for those with € hundreds to blow on Fraport fees, and that assumes Fraport improve the airport facilities and not just skim the revenue
If it means that they open at decent times now and behave like a normal airport (H24 or at least properly at daytime) and also let GA exist so be it. Like what next said, it was overdue by decades that someone kicks those people on those airports but it’s a different issue how it was done.
Alexis, sorry if I insulted you, I was not aware that you are a part of the Troika or an active part of the Berlin Goverment . I tend to make a huge distance between governments and the people they rule. In current times they have less and less in common, which makes the premis “for the people,by the people” often ridiculous.
