Slovenia is a beautiful country and the people are very nice, modern-looking and economically enterprising, without apparent internal racial tensions, and I am sure they will do very well.
They never really fitted into "old Yugoslavia" and they got out of it at their first opportunity.
They don't have to look very far to see how one can mess up a country, do they?
Italy is a corrupt and barely functioning mess, with a farcical PM to top it off. It will need a substantial re-vamp to function for aviation - below the level of bizjets which manage to function everywhere by landing and a man jumps out holding a bundle of $$$$ with which he "lubricates" everybody to make sure he gets fuel, parking, and the boss in the back gets looked after (which is exactly why the world outside the USA is packed with £400-mandatory-handling airports). For piston GA, even working out who really has avgas is a nice job.
Croatia has managed to do quite well, is very well organised and should continue to benefit from tourism made possible by their beautiful coastline and islands (so long as they don't join the naked farce known as the EU) but they have a long way to go before they develop enough internal wealth to have a GA scene of their own. Most pilots landing there are from Germany and Austria, etc. The number of Croat pilots seems to be astonishingly low; someone recently trawled the FAA database for FAA licensed pilots and while this is not a great general statistic there were only about 4 in Croatia against thousands in UK/Germany. I have been there a number of times, nonstop from the UK to
Losinj,
Brac, Split etc. An aviation heaven in every way, though they have recently lifted fuel prices to "EU-duty-added" levels and are presumably pocketing the uplift locally
Serbia I have never flown to but checked it out a few times and they seem to be progressing well to messing it up totally, with silly airport charges.
Albania (& around) you can forget.
Greece is an interesting case and can only get better
English language is a problem for some in Italy etc
I think that is a big factor in GA. I don't know the rules bit I gather you have a choice of either
- an ICAO PPL but have to sit the English exams and pass an English RT test, or
- a local-only PPL which can be done in the local language, but you can't fly to any airport which has full ATC
Greece offers the above options, from what one pilot told me in June.
This will keep a damper on GA, in countries where English is rarely spoken, i.e. much of southern Europe. It also keeps a damper on touring, where the English speaking pilots (Brits, Germans, French, Scandinavia etc) have a big advantage. However few French pilots do any touring...