– Steve Hitchen
PAGC CEO Kevin Elliott likes to describe his air show as being a very different experience for the Australian public. That's pretty fair considering PAGC is the only air show in the country that isn't held at an airport. Although Elliott and his team take aviation to the masses by staging it in front of a general public environment, not having it at an airport means that airports are removed from that experience, and in the case of general aviation, that's not necessarily a good thing. I think it is defendable to say that most of the non-aviation public in Australia would never go to a GA airport just for the hell of it. They go there to get on aircraft and travel to somewhere else. If they don't have that need, I think the majority may have never been to their local airport. Holding air shows at airports puts airfield infrastructure and capability on display, and creates a connection with communities. It shows them what they didn't know they had. PAGC won't make that connection, but it will inspire in other ways. Air shows need to be loud, exciting and colourful to generate awe in the people watching, and you can't argue that it doesn't do that. GA will get some spin-off from that with the expected presence of Freedom Formation, a display of energetic and precision can-do from pilots that exemplify the best of GA. Having that in front of the public is alone enough reason for GA to cheer on PAGC.
The last thing general aviation operators in the Sydney basin need is for Sydney Airport Corporation to kick them in the guts when they're already on their knees. With Western Sydney Airport proving an insatiable consumer of airspace, Bankstown Airport is already struggling to find enough oxygen to survive. If that wasn't enough of a burden, SAC has waded in and flagged very heavy cost increases for operators at the Sydney GA precinct that will further impede the sector's survivability rating in and around the city. What SAC has employed is a tried-and-trusted tactic gleaned from the GA metro airports' strategy book: discourage GA by making it financially unviable. These new charges–open for consultation until 19 May–are designed by SAC's own words to "disincentivise" long-term parking on the GA pad at SYD. Basically, operators will pay $60/hr for the first three hours, but will incur a full-day fee of $3220 if the aircraft is parked for so much as a minute over three hours. At least SAC has been honest with their justification: they want to bring the charges in line with the rest of the airport and "promote efficient use" of the airport. An insider hinted to me that this could be about expanding facilities for regional airlines; they want the ground the GA pad is on. To grab that, they need to reduce or eliminate long-term aircraft parking, leaving short three-hour stays to hot-bunk the remaining space. But will three-hour stays match the profiles of the average business aviation mission? The onus of flexibility in this case is not on SAC, which means the business aviation industry will have to devise a wicked strategy to get around this, or start issuing customers Uber vouchers from Camden.
The good news from this year's Federal Election is that at 1800 tomorrow night it's all over! Almost universally, this campaign is regarded as the most lack-lustre, say-nothing, do-nothing, poke-your-tongue-at-the-other-person, poor excuse for electioneering there has ever been. And through all of that, all parties have been able to get through without uttering the word "aviation". Most notably, the Coalition has been absolutely silent. I know they've received my questions because phone calls confirmed that, but their lack of response leaves the entire industry with no option but to speculate. With that prerogative in my hands, here's a bit of my own speculation. The Coalition kept away from aviation because–right or wrong–they have no counter to the ALP's white paper. Don't start a fight if you don't have the weapons to win it. And is there actually a battle to fight anyway? The ALP is very much on the side of GA transitioning to sustainable energy (and nothing else), the Greens want to kill-off aviation completely and all other parties seem to not have the word "aviation" in their vocabularies. We have no friends in parliament, evidenced by the fact that the 47th parliament had no Parliamentary Friends of Aviation group. For the Coalition to have taken an opposing stance and thrown their weight behind GA would have been a strong point of differentiation. That they didn't do so is indicative of the lack of value they (and all other parties) place on our future.
May your gauges always be in the green,
Hitch