Yankee
3rd May 2006, 05:28
:confused: This question is aimed at any private owner/group residents of East Midland or Humberside airports. We have been trying for a number of years to get our local Manchester Airport Group (MAG) owned airport, Bournemouth, to come up with a smaller block landing fee for regular private users which falls outside the existing block landing fee structure (ie Annual , ¾ , ½ and ¼ yearly rates).
For information these are, Annual 200 times the standard fee, ¾ 175 times, ½ 125 times and ¼ 75 times. For any high user group these figures work out just about favourable, with an average of 4 landings a week, however, for the private owner it just isn’t cost effective nor reasonable to expect a private owner to fly that frequently, and herein lies the problem.
For someone who flies a couple of times a week, and I don’t think many, if any, private owners would average that. Instead they have to go and pay each time with all the time consuming administration cost that this involves.
The problem really raises it’s head when you want to do some circuit training, be it instrument, missed approach or otherwise. The airport’s present pricing policy towards private refresher training just doesn’t encourage this, which could be argued as discouraging flight safety. We have been told by the Bournemouth powers that be that, although they appreciate the suggestion and agree that a smaller block (eg 50 or 60 landings) per annum would make the administration of the fees much simpler, but go on to state that as the group (MAG) policy is quite clear on what can and cannot be done and that smaller block fees is out of the question.
So, the request to you other MAG colleagues is:- are you seeing the same policy adopted at your field? Or is Bournemouth different – We are just trying to find out if the ‘policy’ is universally and fairly applied.
For information these are, Annual 200 times the standard fee, ¾ 175 times, ½ 125 times and ¼ 75 times. For any high user group these figures work out just about favourable, with an average of 4 landings a week, however, for the private owner it just isn’t cost effective nor reasonable to expect a private owner to fly that frequently, and herein lies the problem.
For someone who flies a couple of times a week, and I don’t think many, if any, private owners would average that. Instead they have to go and pay each time with all the time consuming administration cost that this involves.
The problem really raises it’s head when you want to do some circuit training, be it instrument, missed approach or otherwise. The airport’s present pricing policy towards private refresher training just doesn’t encourage this, which could be argued as discouraging flight safety. We have been told by the Bournemouth powers that be that, although they appreciate the suggestion and agree that a smaller block (eg 50 or 60 landings) per annum would make the administration of the fees much simpler, but go on to state that as the group (MAG) policy is quite clear on what can and cannot be done and that smaller block fees is out of the question.
So, the request to you other MAG colleagues is:- are you seeing the same policy adopted at your field? Or is Bournemouth different – We are just trying to find out if the ‘policy’ is universally and fairly applied.