That's Slinfold. Not far from Dunsfold. It's real allright. A nice airfield, established with (IIRC) full planning. It came on the market 1-2 years ago at £1.8M (I still have the newspaper cutting dated 17 Feb 2005 right here) and I thought I heard it was sold quite some months ago. I don't have £1.5M and it's a bit far for me to drive so I didn't buy it. Otherwise it seems ideal.
A lot of money to pay for the house though (worth 750k I guess) and having to put up with other pilots coming and going. It's purely a "pilot's purchase" but few UK private pilots will have 1.5M to spend. Slinfold is also not exactly in an attractive area, IMHO, for the price.
It's a bit like that air park in Murcia, Spain, that has been "nearly ready" for several years. It looks great but then you have to ask yourself whether you really want to live next to a busy airport (they would have a school there) and pay a premium price for the house and live in the middle of nowhere. The formula works with US air parks, where one has low activity.
It seems to me that the real issue is if you want to operate a decent long distance plane from a strip. If you want to fly a microlight or something like a Maule that gets airborne in 100m or so, you have many more options. For something like a TB20 or an SR22 one needs 700m of good flat grass. One can get airborne in 300-400m but not if it's raining.
Last edited by IO540; 22nd November 2006 at 09:25.