Bankstown Airport - Is it all Doom and Gloom?

[turboplanner]

20 minutes ago, red750 said:

Pardon my for sidetracking for a moment, but I had a thoroughly disappointing day today. Our Men's Shed was closed as some members, including a co-ordinator, have Covid, so I thought I would enjoy a glorious sunny day and go to Lilydale airport, a place I haven't been in about 5 years.

 

There were a number of aircraft tied down in various states of neglect. On the flightline, there were three PA-28s, and three ex-Soar Aviation yellow Foxbats. A red and white Pitts Special, which I think had been performing aeros overhead, landed and taxied past the flying school. One of the PA-28's and one of the Foxbats started up, and after a short while, taxied to the holding point. They held there for a short while, waiting while another Foxbat came in, floated about halfway down the runway before landing. I didn't wait to see the others take off. So in the half hour or so I was there, four movements.

 

Then I drove to Coldstream, which was even more depressing. Only one PA-28 parked outside the clubrooms, and a partly disassembled Pier Aztec way down the back next to a hangar. Not a thing was moving.

 

Granted, it is Friday, and things may liven up tomorrow, but I thought there may have been a little more action.

I flew in there about 1986 and had lunch. No other movements at all then, so this is an improvement but perhaps activity lifts at the weekends.

[kgwilson]

Aerodromes can be vey lonely places. Sometime I go up to my hangar on a perfect day for flying. Get some fuel, preflight and takeoff for a great local flight. I hear little on the radio, sometimes just the odd person at a far away CTAF with a 10 mile or joining call & if I'm monitoring centre just one or two RPT or IFR calls. I make a 10 mile and joing call, land and put the plane away. I have lunch and do something around the hangar, then drive home without having spoken to anyone all day.

 

Then on another day there are aircraft and pilots all over the place. Visiting aircraft come and go and the airwaves are full of chatter. That's just the way it is.

[red750]

A photo from yesterday at Lilydale

 

[facthunter]

OME. why would you need a list of the entrants to your event then?  Nev

[spacesailor]

" then drive home without talking to anyone " .

That a very good reason to ' join RecreationalFlying ' .

Like I did . " be happy to be here " .

spacesailor

[old man emu]

On 26/10/2023 at 11:54 AM, Carbon Canary said:

I don't have any knowledge of contaminated ground, but given the extensive buildings that were there during the war years, the presence of asbestos is almost guaranteed. 

The asbestos is there alright. The leaseholder knows all about it.

 

On 27/10/2023 at 10:51 AM, turboplanner said:

People should contact the management of an airfield if they have any concerns.

The work I do on Bankstown and Camden is required so that the tenants meet the conditions of their leases. It is very simple stuff that is required to comply with the AIRPORTS (ENVIRONMENT PROTECTION) REGULATIONS. I've been doing it for ten years now and over that time have often tried to contact the Airport Environment Officer for clarification of matters. I await a response. The leaseholder has failed in its requirement to promote aviation at those airports. I am pretty sure that the same applies to the behaviour of the leaseholders of the major GA airports in the other Capitols.

[Carbon Canary]

Class G to Class D for much of the western Sydney basin and requiring a transponder and flight plan

https://www.australianflying.com.au/latest/new-airspace-design-to-reduce-class-g-in-sydney-basin

 

RAAus will need to get access to controlled airspace sorted sooner rather than later.

[facthunter]

Or stay away and don't mingle.   Nev

[Thruster88]

10 minutes ago, Carbon Canary said:

 

 

RAAus will need to get access to controlled airspace sorted sooner rather than later.

Any RAAus pilot can do this now. Equippe the aircraft, get an RPL ( in a VH aircraft,  easy), do the training which will be required either way and oh I forgot they will need a CASA medical.  

[facthunter]

Then you'll find it's stressful and no fun at all unless you get paid for it..   Nev

[Jerry_Atrick]

What the article doesn't mention is the number of movements Western Sydney is forecast to have, so it makes it difficult to assess the need for Class D. I operate out of two London-ish airfields - Fairoaks (located in the Heathrow zone) and Blackbushe (located in Farnborough's Class D airspace. We have Heathrow, Gatwick, Luton, Stanstead, London City that are all busy CAT airports, as well as Southend ramping up. We also have Biggin Hill and Farnborough as fairly busy bizjet airports. There are airfields in the zone (Redhill, Denham, Fairoaks), and some just outside it (High Wycombe, Blackbushe, Elstree, White Waltham (which is half in the Heathrow zone), Stapleford Noth Weald, and i am sure I am missing one or two. Until Farnborough got their airspace grab of Class D (which most guess involved brown paper bags), there was lots of class G under 2,500'. But there were notable choke points for people trying to stay out of Class D, and there are now more. This may be something to look out for

 

Whenever I fly, there is a Class D transit and even Class D bimbling. Never had to lodge a flight plan (the only time I do is when flying to the continent). In class D, we are told the route we have to take and we take it. I guess our longer radio calls though, form some sort of flight plan.

 

I like flying in Class D.. It is not as restrictive as most think; yet you are always under a flight following.. And ATC are working to stop you bumping into someone else.

Edited December 27, 2023 by Jerry_Atrick

[red750]

re my post on 27 Oct 23, I repeated the visit to both Lilydale and Coldsteam today, as it was  Saturday and I thought there might e a bit more activity. 

 

At Lilydale, a helicopter approached as I was nearing the airport, and when I arrived, it was refuelling. Left shortly after. There were a few people around the skydiving hanger, but nobody but the female receptionist at the flying school.  A Beech 36 and a Warrior taxied out and took off, and the Skydive Cessna Caravan refuelled and taxied back to the hhangar. No other activity while I as there. 

 

Next I went to Coldstream where there were four aircraft parked, two near the flying school, and two more down the other end of the field. Mine was the only car at the airfield. Someone came out of the flying school and started one of the aircraft, a Tecnam. He taxied down and circled the two aircraft at the other end of the fileld then back to the school. He cut the engine and rolled about ten metres with the engine dead. It rolled to a stop and he hopped out and went back into the school building.

 

Another uninspiring day.

 

 

[facthunter]

There's hardly any aircraft go past here now. I'm about 1/2 way between Kyneton and Riddels creek.  Nev

[turboplanner]

10 hours ago, red750 said:

re my post on 27 Oct 23, I repeated the visit to both Lilydale and Coldsteam today, as it was  Saturday and I thought there might e a bit more activity. 

 

At Lilydale, a helicopter approached as I was nearing the airport, and when I arrived, it was refuelling. Left shortly after. There were a few people around the skydiving hanger, but nobody but the female receptionist at the flying school.  A Beech 36 and a Warrior taxied out and took off, and the Skydive Cessna Caravan refuelled and taxied back to the hhangar. No other activity while I as there. 

 

Next I went to Coldstream where there were four aircraft parked, two near the flying school, and two more down the other end of the field. Mine was the only car at the airfield. Someone came out of the flying school and started one of the aircraft, a Tecnam. He taxied down and circled the two aircraft at the other end of the fileld then back to the school. He cut the engine and rolled about ten metres with the engine dead. It rolled to a stop and he hopped out and went back into the school building.

 

Another uninspiring day.

 

 

What are you trying to prove?

 

Lilydale Airport is open 7 days a week, 24 hours a day; not many airfields around Australia can boast that.

The activity you saw is about the same as I've seen when driving past a few hundred times over the past 30 years - usually nothing flying or maybe one on the ground and one in the circuit.

Part of the reason these days is that permission is required from an employee of the airport and cannot be obtained on CTAF, so they are contolling runway maintenance for those based at the field.

 

RVAC moved their flying school out of Coldstream a few years ago.

 

Both airports are a long way from a comparison with Bankstown which is what this thread is about.

 

We established that:

 

Bankstown had 243,126 annual movements in 2011 and 248,000 in 2017

Moorabbin 295,000 (800/day in 2023)

Van Nuys, California had 300,000 in 2023

So our metropolitan airports are roughly  on a par with California

 

If it comes to observations, I sat around Gunnedah Airport for an hour and only heard cockatoos squawking; I parked the caravan on another one for an afternoon and a morning and nobody came.

 

People are entitled to make their own business decisions, and operate however it produces a profit.

 

What we found earlier in the thread is that light aircraft operation is much different today compared to 40 years ago, so no point in trying to go back to the past with the old ex WW2 concepts.

 

 

As of 26/1/24   RAA had:
6,300 active pilots   (GA PPL and RPL: 10804)

3232 aircraft

160 Flight Schools

29 Affiliated Clubs

 

That's where the action is.

 

 

 

 

 

[walrus]

Got to New Zealand and visit a few airports, better still the USA. Only then will you understand the depth of our ruin and the tremendous damage that has been done.

[KRviator]

4 hours ago, turboplanner said:

We established that:

 

Bankstown had 243,126 annual movements in 2011 and 248,000 in 2017

Moorabbin 295,000 (800/day in 2023)

Van Nuys, California had 300,000 in 2023

So our metropolitan airports are roughly  on a par with California

And when you look at the [latest figures, it's dropped yet again. For the first 6 months of FY23/24, Archerfield had 110,000, of which half were fling-wing. Bankstown had 109,000, though 15% were helicopters here. Morabbin is the most popular at 134,000 for 6 months, with similar helo percentages to Bankstown. Extrapolate those figures for the full FY and you're looking at 220,000 movements for Bankstown, still 10% lower than a decade ago.

And that's the key takeaway from these latest figures - they continue to show the decline in GA movements at our largest airports, and by extension, airports across the country.

[skippydiesel]

Speculation:

 

• The decline in interest in aviation seems to be consistent with the  distance, in time, from the second World War.
• Post War babies/adults, were fascinated by the booming mechanical technology of the recent past and their present - As this (my) generation fade away and cutting edge technology moves, ever more, to computer based innovation, so does the level of interest in aviation fade - also in all sorts of, formally well patronised, technologies eg steam/internal combustion engines/etc.
• In the wealthy West, the young of today are gripped by computer provided/generated communication & innovation, in much the same way as we were about mechanical devices. It manifests very differently (low levels of interpersonal contact being the most obvious) but I suspect is a similar phenomenon - while many/ most? of our generation, had some level of understanding of the ICE/jet engine/road vehicle & aircraft /steam/ 240/12V electrical reticulation /etc, the young can babble on, in a completely foreign language (to me) about computing and associated technologies. They are unphased about not having a depth of general knowledge (about anything much) as Google/etc is literally at hand, a resource completely dwarfing anything we may have stashed away in our puny brain.
• Future flight/travel is likely to be dominated by autonomous aircraft/ships/vehicles - much safer/efficient than having a pilot/crew/driver. The transition to this has already well advanced with drones and all sort of computer aided fight systems.  I suspect that many of today's commercial pilots are in it for the $$/prestige (fading), if they have a genuine interest in flight, they may fly small recreational aircraft/gliders for fun. 
• I don't see this trend changing any time soon - small (than the major city ones)  will no longer be the hive of activity that our parents and we experienced in their hayday. If they continue to exist at all, it will be as commuter ports for autonomous aircraft.

 

 

 

[turboplanner]

I went checking for some meaningful facts, and was able to get 62 years of history of Moorabbin movements by calendar year.

 

The dotted line is the auto-generated trend line.

The green line shows that for 60 years Moorabbin has had 200,000 movements or more

 

Companies would kill for stability like that.

 

[KRviator]

3 hours ago, turboplanner said:

I went checking for some meaningful facts, and was able to get 62 years of history of Moorabbin movements by calendar year.

 

The dotted line is the auto-generated trend line.

The green line shows that for 60 years Moorabbin has had 200,000 movements or more

 

Companies would kill for stability like that.

 

SO why the drop from 10 straight years of 300,000 movements in the early 90's?

Look at '89 - did they get to 400K that year? Seems like the last time Morabbin made it over 300K was 15 years ago - and I'd actually question how many of these movements recently had numbers on the side when back in the day, AUF was verboten from CTA/CTR, so everything you'd see 'back then' had to be VH-.

And I think your trend line is broken. There's no trend, it looks to be static at around 290,000 movements.

[turboplanner]

13 minutes ago, KRviator said:

SO why the drop from 10 straight years of 300,000 movements in the early 90's?

Look at '89 - did they get to 400K that year? Seems like the last time Morabbin made it over 300K was 15 years ago - and I'd actually question how many of these movements recently had numbers on the side when back in the day, AUF was verboten from CTA/CTR, so everything you'd see 'back then' had to be VH-.

And I think your trend line is broken. There's no trend, it looks to be static at around 290,000 movements.

The trend line shows the business volume had been viable for 62 years.

If you want to continually run an industry down, don't stay in it.

 

 

[skippydiesel]

"If you want to continually run an industry down, don't stay in it."

 

It seems to me, that most if not all, are lamenting what they see as a steady down trend, in interest in aviation - no one is running it down.

[Student Pilot]

GA has lost its sheen. You can call being truthful and passing on your negative experiences "running it down" but it's just really passing on how the degradation of GA affects us. Most of those who used to fly just cannot afford it anymore, driven out by over regulation, over zealous regulator, greedy airport owners/councils/operators, compounding costs of maintenance/liability and hull insurance/fuel and cost of aircraft. 
 

Turbo, you can talk it up all you like but the reality is different to all the statistics you quote. 

[turboplanner]

22 hours ago, Student Pilot said:

GA has lost its sheen. You can call being truthful and passing on your negative experiences "running it down" but it's just really passing on how the degradation of GA affects us. Most of those who used to fly just cannot afford it anymore, driven out by over regulation, over zealous regulator, greedy airport owners/councils/operators, compounding costs of maintenance/liability and hull insurance/fuel and cost of aircraft. 
 

Turbo, you can talk it up all you like but the reality is different to all the statistics you quote. 

I pulled data from Airservices for Secondary City Airports, Regional Airports and some Towns for the latest full Year 2023. The figures on sheet WX00278 show the monthly movement figures.

 

WX00279

On the graph, the monthly figures are shown in bundles for each location.

I worked in a Company which had about 40 different types of Transport products and each month we would arrive in the board room at 6 am and finish at 6 pm analysing the months performance of each product. The production for the month would be decided for each product, cut back if we hadn’t sold enough stock, increased if sales were ahead, and an advertising programme introduced if we were behind along with incentives. Some businesses do this daily.

 

To make some sense of this we need benchmarks, so we might pick population for the City Airports. 5.2 million for Moorabbin (Melbourne), 5.1 million for Bankstown, 2.5 million for Archerfield, 1.4 million for Parafield, 2.1 million for Jandakot.

 

Using these benchmarks, Bankstown is holding up well against Moorabbin, Archerfield is punching above its weight, and Parafield is either sliding down or Jandakot is performing above its population base.

 

In general though, all reasonably stable against population catchment.

 

Essendon tells its own story, which we are not going to here.

 

Camden fits into the peri-urban character.

 

Then we have:

Townsville:                  205,000

Mackay:                       139,000

Albury/Wodonga:        100,000

Rockhampton:             84,000

Coffs Harbour:             82,000             dropping below the pack

Karratha:                     21,500             punching well above the pack

Tamworth:                   65,500

 

The Albury – Tamworth group introduces the factor of Rural activities and income groups.

Karratha gets a big boost from mining.

Roma, Queensland is one of the best examples (although I couldn’t get movements)

In the 1960’s a local was selling tickets from the back of a Ford Falcon Ute.

In 2013/14 the airport processed 254,000 passengers, ranking 29^th in Australia

The population of Roma is just 6,522.

 

Another variable is the type of activity.

The Upper and Lower South East of South Australia produces half the Agribusiness income for the State, so we would expect airfields to do better there than in the baren areas of the north.

 

In the South East, in the 1960s the Naracoorte airport consisted of two sheds, this is it today,

Population of Naracoorte is 5,960.

 

In other areas the agribusiness is dying, the population doesn’t get the money to spend on flying and operations are shrinking.

 

In the mining areas, airfield operators are buying newer, bigger aircraft and running their own coaches around the towns to pick up the FIFOS.

 

It’s a free world; as the Mayor of the Gold Coast used to say “Two men looking out through bars, one saw mud, the other stars.”

 

[Reynard]

I don’t think many people on this recreational flying forum are particularly interested in commercial GA activity. What would be a more interesting statistic is the number of private GA movements over time. This is where the doom and gloom is. I know these numbers are not separately available, but the peak of private GA activity and private GA aircraft ownership in Australia was probably in the late 70’s early 80’s.  The average GA training aircraft also dates to these times.  RA-Aus is possibly seeing a resurgence as a more affordable option but I haven’t looked at their aircraft ownership and pilot number trends.

Also, foreign airline student training at some of Australia’s regional airports, would contribute a significant number of movements particularly before Covid. This is fine for the airport operators and the individual flying schools but it’s not necessarily adding to Australia’s private pilot pool.

[turboplanner]

44 minutes ago, Reynard said:

I don’t think many people on this recreational flying forum are particularly interested in commercial GA activity. What would be a more interesting statistic is the number of private GA movements over time. This is where the doom and gloom is. I know these numbers are not separately available, but the peak of private GA activity and private GA aircraft ownership in Australia was probably in the late 70’s early 80’s.  The average GA training aircraft also dates to these times.  RA-Aus is possibly seeing a resurgence as a more affordable option but I haven’t looked at their aircraft ownership and pilot number trends.

Also, foreign airline student training at some of Australia’s regional airports, would contribute a significant number of movements particularly before Covid. This is fine for the airport operators and the individual flying schools but it’s not necessarily adding to Australia’s private pilot pool.

What are you calling commercial and what are you calling private in GA?

Aircraft ownership is a different trend. 

There are 6300 RA pilots sharing 3232 RA aircraft  (jan 26, 2024)

There are 10,804 GA PPL?RPL pilots and 11,970 single engine piston