What does an active recreational flying fraternity contribute to a community

[waraton]

To put positives up to those who manage an airfield I am after positive points to make about what it is recreational pilots bring to the table. Some of my thoughts....

 

Offer diversity for interests/hobbies making that area more attractive 

 

Provide a starting point for training pilots and maintenance workers

 

Economic benefits contributing to sustainability of related infrastructure 

 

 

[turboplanner]

9 minutes ago, waraton said:

To put positives up to those who manage an airfield I am after positive points to make about what it is recreational pilots bring to the table. Some of my thoughts....

 

Offer diversity for interests/hobbies making that area more attractive 

 

Provide a starting point for training pilots and maintenance workers

 

Economic benefits contributing to sustainability of related infrastructure 

 

 

Directly, they eat, they stay at a motel, they use a taxi (in BH), they buy fuel, When you allocate the number of days based on day visit or vacation, the number of aircraft visiting. number of people per aircraft and so on plus entry fees and purchases from tourist spots, sales of paintings etc it will be a substantial amount of income for ratepayers over a year. I did this and had Councils paying substantial prize money.

[kgwilson]

Benefits to the community in the case of South Grafton are we have a clubhouse that can be hired out to other community groups, we run an annual community event which is free to everyone, we provide a landing area for Angel Flight, Hospital patient transfer aircraft and the Westpac emergency helicopter at no charge (when it is hot & they can't takeoff with a full load from the Hospital pad). We are basically right on the edge of town so that helps.

[walrus]

The first thing it does is provide an additional stream of customers into the local economy. As turbo explains they have to eat drink and sleep somewhere. This is a straight transport operation.

 

To this add marginal increase in tourism traffic (eg winery flights adventure tourism, hiking drop offs, parachuting, etc. etc.

 

To this add marginal increase in business related travel. Include fire fighting, power line inspection, etc. as well.

 

To this add aircraft operation and maintenance jobs - they would have a multiplier effect of about 8 - one full time aircraft job supports about 8 service industry jobs.

 

You will be surprised at how fast the jobs add up.

 

The tragedy is that we should have been doing such calculations 40 years ago and regulating accordingly on a national basis.  Instead we allowed ourselves to be beaten into an anal lawyer driven cluster*&*&.

 

Look at NZ to view a functioning aviation segment of an economy.

[turboplanner]

4 minutes ago, walrus said:

The tragedy is that we should have been doing such calculations 40 years ago and regulating accordingly on a national basis.  Instead we allowed ourselves to be beaten into an anal lawyer driven cluster*&*&.

For Broken Hill it was partly the 1979 fuel crisis. We travelled up there a lot in the seventies, and Silverton was firing up, the Mines had good day tours, and the art industry was exploding with the momentum. You could get a ticket to fly round on the mail run to the outback stations on a Sunday and see what it's like to land in a Cherokee 6 with the wings slapping down saplings on bush strips and then it was gone. I was selling coaches which ran outback tours, and then it was all gone; the caravans were left in the shed or out on the nature strip, the coach ticket price broke through the line of no return, people stopped coming, the art shops started to dry up and the city quietened down.

 

It's a good time to run all the figures again and see what the potential is; there's a lot of money in the economy.