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Old 20th October 2004 | 16:29
  #23 (permalink)  
IO540
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Joined: Jun 2003
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From: EuroGA.org
What country are you referring to?

I looked at this a year or so ago.

What you describe sounds a great place to live. The bit I am unsure of is what exactly would be the attraction of living so close to an airfield, perhaps making compromises on other fronts.

It would make a lot of sense if one's lifestyle was such that private flying was used a great deal to get about, but while that appears common in the USA it is very rare in Europe, perhaps because the weather isn't as good, the distances aren't as great, there are far fewer airfields that are usable in less than very good weather, and it is a lot more expensive to fly.

I agree that an air park would be ideal for those (few) people who fit this lifestyle. But one needs to find a lot more people to make it commercially viable.

I bet that whatever location you find that contains a nice airfield, there are going to be as good and cheaper houses say 10 miles away as one would find right next to the runway. And 10 miles isn't far to drive if one is going to fly 500 miles.

I went through this when looking quite seriously at the Murcia air park, with a view to purchasing a house there to stay in occassionally and to rent out to pilots in the UK and elsewhere. There is "going to be" a flight training business there and this would appear an ideal setup for PPL training, in a much better climate than the UK normally has - and shipping PPL students from the UK to Murcia is far quicker and cheaper than shipping them to Florida.

Eventually I dropped this idea because the developers were not responding to communications, in a manner which made me very suspicious. But if you can find a nice airfield in Spain (not many of them) you can find a good enough hotel a few miles away, so it could be difficult to get decent rental rates at the air park.

France doesn't have significantly better weather than the UK unless one goes a long way south.

No matter how I look at it, an air park in Europe is something which one must consider primarily for the location and the house, and if a runway is near that is a bonus. One must remember that most candidate residents have to work to make money. Very few retired people are going to fly frequently enough to want to buy into an air park.

The big problem in the UK is airfields disappearing, often under pressure from property developers. I think that 20 years from now, at least half the present GA-accessible airfields will be gone. When this happens, a lot of people just stop flying for good because the nearest might be two hours' drive. It is an interesting question whether an air park gives one better security.
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