photofly wrote: ↑Sun Dec 13, 2020 11:55 am
Three older 172s, six instructors, mostly part time, I would guess. Owen Sound has not yet become a destination for flight training.
Either way, it means he has staff to draw upon. If he takes the management contract, he has an extra means to offer the staff some employment - especially for part time instructors, a bit of extra cash to make your trip to the airport worth while is always worth it. But that’s just my view. If the big factors, snow and grass, are taken care of by the MD, everything else can be easily managed by the flight school (or any other business that has a few employees to use) light maintenance, emergency contacting, FOD patrols, parking, billing, fuel sales, etc.
Now in reality the best solution is to find a K.F. To live on your airport, who will do everything for it and has a strong enthusiasm for the task who will grow the airport’s usage, but those are few and far between (and unfortunately there is one less of this year
) so that is unlikely. The first real step is to have a working relationship between the interested parties where everyone should be working towards making the airport more viable, and I dare say profitable.
Fact of the matter, this thread would be just as long, and the same, if the landing fee was 5 bucks.
No. The fact of the matter is that landing fees aren’t always the solution to the problems with airport viability. You have to have traffic to warrant them, and a necessity of use for the airport so those who land there don’t have alternatives, or the service provided is superior. The proposal of landing fees is often brought up not to fund the airport - since often they don’t do that well - but to reduce traffic. Often with the interests of eliminating a certain sect of traffic (for example CYYC has made no bones about making light traffic pay through the nose to keep it away) or for small airports, closing them entirely. They horrifically impact small businesses that run on the airport. They reduce fuel sales, which in most little airports also reduces revenue.
Even if a fee is warranted and makes sense for revenue, they still add to the negative impression for customer/pilots. You don’t want to feel dinged for even the smallest use. It’s even worse when you get places with no facility or service looking to charge prices that normally you’d be getting at a full service FBO. The better option is usually to charge for parking, but make sure that you have a facility people want to park at. Customers need to feel they are getting something for what they are paying for. They are not wrong in expecting that for the basic service of a runway, they are already paying tax dollars to fund.
Here is a small business analogy for you. Suppose the town put a toll booth on the road that led to your business. Maybe they could argue that your clientele was so exclusive that they were the ones mostly using that road so thus should fund its upkeep. Now even if the toll they charged was only a penny, well a nickel rounding up, you would lose a lot of business. If you then also found out the town spent $11000 dollars installing the toll booth, and it costs then $2000 per year to administer the system (common price for a such a unit when all install costs are tallied) that they spent your tax dollars on... well you might be less than impressed. Probably less so when you discover all the neighbours of are exempt from the toll, and it’s only your clientele and you that is being charged. I mean it’s just a nickel right?
I'm not sure what's more depressing: That everyone has a price, or how low the price always is.
