Kiwi of course that is the fact...someone has to pay eventually....but user pays is the only fair system. The damage and wearing out of our runways by the obscene amount of movements now at our airfield is just crazy.
We used to just maintain with club members before all this govt subsidized traing hex style has come in. At Ycab now there are 3 rec flying schools and 2 of them do some GA training and we have another that has 6 GA aircraft and about 5 or 6 helicopters and its literally non stopn all day almost every day of the week
I have made a radio monitoring unit that gets all the radio calls automatically and records them. This then gets decoded to get the call signs..same as what Avdata do to be able to gauge TO and Landings. I have been testing it this past couple of weeks from my house before it goes down to the airfield for some more fine tuning...I was shocked at how many movements there are on a daily basis..this is why the airfield is being torn apart.
How many calls do you think there is in one week of ops..............over 10000 !!!!!!!. How do I know this???...every radio call is recorded when the mute of the monitoring radio and a single file is created. After 1 week there are 10,000 files. 99.9% of those files are genuine calls
Now some are from Caloundra but not as many as Ycab...I am tailoring it so I can pretty much clip all the caloundra ones within reason. On some calcs I have done and listening out of that 10000 there are more than 6 to 7000 for YCAB..base about 3 calls per circuit so thats more than 2000 landings per week !!!! and I believe that is conservative
Flying training is expensive now and its just going to be one of those things. Unless someone gives us 150k + a year out of the goodness of their hearts where does the money come from...private ops at Ycab are well in the minority now. maybe the average private op is about once a week at best.