• Spanish CAVOK … but where the hell are all the aeroplanes?
    Spanish CAVOK … but where the hell are all the aeroplanes?
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Hitch finds the Spanish skies uncomfortably void of General Aviation.

It has been 28 years since I logged my first flying hours, and you would think after all that time the sound of a Continental or Lycoming would be prosaic to me. Nope, I still stop and look up every time I hear a small plane fly over. And I have no intention of stopping that practise in the future.

My neck got a long rest in January as my partner – Sonya the Magnificent – and I embarked on a four-week holiday in the south of Spain. The weather was sensational, the ambient perfect, the skies azure and uninterrupted by cloud…or aeroplanes. Seriously, except for a biplane agwagon south-west of Granada and a few lighties using the regional at Cordoba, there was nought in the air but the kero burners.

And it wasn’t just that no-one was flying. As Spanair taxied at Seville I was able to count all the planes in the GA park without having to take my socks off. What a sad world, I thought.

It reminded me that even though GA in Australia is only a mere trifling compared to what it was in the halcyon years of the late 1970s, we still have a healthier industry than many other nations around the world. However, GA is a fragile ecology in this country, and like all fragile ecologies it needs to be managed with care and conviction.

Our advantage here is infrastructure and distance. Aviation developed in Australia because of a need to bridge the gap between the capital cities and to connect the regional centres. As a result, we have airports, whereas our Spanish counterparts are a bit light-on for places to fly to (there are less than 50 airports in the whole country). Add to that a train service that connects Seville to Madrid in about two hours and there is not a lot of incentive to fly.

Without the basic infrastructure in place, any attempt to catalyse a GA industry in Spain now would probably fall flat. But it works the other way around, too. Vanishing airports will promote nothing but the decay of GA in Australia, and we need to protect and preserve what we have. It is such a shame that the industry has to fight so hard against the very people we elected just to keep what is already there.

I have decided to take the Spanish experience as a visit from a Dickensian ghost. This is the Ghost of Aviation Future showing me what Australia will look like if we ever tire of the fight to keep GA. It is not a pretty sight, and if we want to keep flying we need to keep fighting.

Should we fail to do that, we might be able to count all the lighties at Jandakot on two hands as well.

May your gauges always be in the green,

Hitch

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