User Fees: An Eye-Opening Article

The latest issue of AOPA Pilot came in today. There's always a lot of interesting stuff in Pilot each month, but the one article that caught my attention was on European-Style User Fees. How the Euro user fee structure works, and the consequences it brings to the GA community, is particularly relevant to all US general aviation pilots, because the Bush Administration, together with the FAA, is pushing for a possibly similar fee structure here.

So what do user fees cost in real life? To find out, AOPA went on an IFR flight from London's Biggin Hill Airport to Frankfurt. For this flight, in a Twin Comanche, the user fees alone totaled up to be over $200! And that doesn't even include talking to a preflight weather briefer -- it's cheaper to obtain weather information over the Internet (for which you pay a separate $100/year subscription fee -- there's no free aviationweather.gov in Europe). Anything and everything is pay-as-you-go. For example:

• A missed approach, even though you didn't land, still results in an Eurocontrol charge of about $20.
• Weather didn't turn out as expected, and everything near a major airline hub airport is "fogged in", but you still have to land (maybe you're low on fuel)? Eurocontrol bureaucrats in Brussels say: "hmm, too bad for your pocketbook..." If it happens near Frankfurt/Main, with no other options available, that'll be about $1,000+ for landing fees and penalty fees because you showed up out of the blue without a reserved slot.

There's another side to the user fee debate that's a bit less obvious: I always wondered why there were so many US-registered aircraft operating in Europe. The AOPA Pilot article provided an explanation: flying a US-registered aircraft means that you do not have to have an European license. Since the cost of obtaining a US license is so much less -- with more opportunities for practice (after all, we don't pay for touch-and-goes or missed approaches in the States) -- many European airplane owners opt to get their licenses in the USA and register their aircraft there. After all, that little plastic card from the US Department of Transportation allows a person to fly an N-registered airplane pretty much anywhere in the world.

There's an eye-opening 8 minute user fee video on AOPA's website (accessible to everyone, not just members) that details the London-Frankfurt experience. Well worth watching.