It's been a few months since I left Blackpool, so I may be way out of date.
When I left last summer, there were lots of rumours about the terminal building being extended to the east. This would involve displacing some, if not all, of the flying schools, whose hangars are to the east of the terminal building.
Relationships between the airport and the flying schools had been less-than-perfect for quite a while. Turning the flying schools' car-parks into public long-term parking went down particularly badly. My school was forced to pay a large sum for staff passes to enable all its staff to use the car park free of charge. The airport wanted to charge all our members a similar fee. We queried this, and also queried whether our trial lessons would have to pay for parking (the airport was genuinely shocked to hear that we had over 1000 trial lessons a year), and the airport eventually decided to allow us to stamp our customers' parking passes to enable them to use the car park free of charge. Nevertheless, there was a marked decrease in walk-in enquiries about trial lessons after the car park changes were made, with potential customers driving up to the parking barrier then turning away, not realising that we'd be able to stamp their ticket if they made a genuine enquiry.
Then there was the ongoing issue over the hangar doors - the doors at the rear of the hangar which open onto the apron. For many many months, we complained that the doors were difficult to open and close. The airport (who own the hangar, and are responsible for the doors) refused to spend any money fixing them. We always believed that this was because the airport were planning on knocking down our hangar one day. Eventually, the school decided to ban staff from attempting to move the doors by hand, because of health+safety fears over damaged backs. We started to use the hydraulic aircraft tug to move the doors, but stopped when we realised this was damaging the lifting gear of the tug, and might result in puncturing a tyre of an aircraft. So the only option was to leave the hangar doors permanently open. We called airport security each night to inform them that the doors had been left open - and it was only a few months after we started doing this that the airport finally relented and fixed the doors.
So - I wonder if this latest news is just another way of putting pressure on the schools to vacate and make room for a future terminal expansion? It doesn't sound like they're trying to kick out all GA if they have lowered landing fees, it would only be based aircraft that are affected. And why would they do that, except to claim the ground used by the hangars for their own use?
Perhaps someone who is still based there can shed some light on my theory, and whether my facts are out of date, as I left Blackpool last summer.....
FFF
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