Locations like Temora benefit from the large number of vehicle based visitors to town for many reasons, including the museum. Visiting aircraft are small volume for most of the year
Let me take the liberty of tweaking that for you.
Temora benefits from a large number of vehicle based visitors for many reasons,
mainly the museum’s
air displays. The air display days provide the perfect excuse for the bike club and the car club to organise a rally to Temora, and for other travellers to visit and stay there. They don’t rally to visit and stay at Wallendbeen or Stockingbingal or Barmedman or Ardelethan (nice though all those towns may be).
And most of those Temora air display activities constitute … general aviation. Most of the maintenance is done by volunteer maintenance engineers with …. general aviation backgrounds. New general aviation businesses have been established at Temora.
I get it that, in Australia, it’s convenient for those in the bureaucracy to downplay the economic value of general aviation by perpetuating the impression that general aviation just a diminishing bunch of whinging private pilots at the margins. But fire fighting is general aviation. Medevac is general aviation. Search and rescue is general aviation. ‘Crop dusting’ is general aviation.
Where do the pilots who fly those aircraft start out? Where do the engineers who keep those aircraft come from? We drive small flying schools into the ground with charges and regulatory over-kill, and charge rents and fees that deter investment in other aviation-related businesses, such that many aerodromes are ghost towns most of the time, just begging to be turned into warehouses and DFOs. We can bring in pilots and engineers from overseas on visas, so we should just get on with it.
What a lucky country.