You could buy a farm with sufficient space to grade and seed your own
runway.Â* The farm house would make a terrific club house and the barn
would be turned into a shop.Â* That would be a lot cheaper that $5-9
million and wouldn't have to be too far away from population centers.

On 3/13/2018 10:10 AM, Papa3 wrote:
On Monday, March 12, 2018 at 4:45:06 PM UTC-4, Michael Opitz wrote:
The problem I have seen
over many years, is that the typical average USA club members just
don't have the dedication or discipline to follow the proven European
model. Until that mentality changes, the differences between
equipment will continue to be dramatic, and the few hard working
members will continue to realize they are being taken advantage of,
burn themselves out, and leave to do other things. The slackers are
then left asking themselves "What happened?"

RO
Hey Mike,

I asked the question because I wanted to get these sorts of responses. Having flown extensively in UK and Europe, it's exactly the above that leaps out. The clubs do all of their own work and have the facilities required to do that work (shops and hangars). Being one of the guys who is becoming burned out (two full refinish projects in the last 5 years), it's that community that's missing in many clubs in the US (though not all).

One related thing though is that issue of owning the airfield. I noted the large club that bought their field for 190,000 DM in 1999 as mentioned by Andreas. If we tried to buy our airfield 20 years ago, the asking price was $5,000,000 (five million) and today it's north of $9,000,000. Because of land use policies in the US, there is little separation between City/Town and "country", so anything within 100 miles of a major population center is going to be incredibly expensive.

It's been my observation that most of the more successful clubs (again with some exceptions) have ownership of the airport. One of the big problems (as your club knows quite acutely) is that being able to afford an airport in the US anywhere near a major population center is a challenge. So, you either end up "out in the boondocks" (for our EU friends, that means a 2 hour to 3 hour drive from where people live) or you end up coexisting on a busy public use airport with a lot of issues (such as not being able to winch launch).

It's not that Americans are (all) stupid or stubborn, but the economics are fundamentally different. And yeah, some of us are incredibly stupid and stubborn.

Erik Mann

--
Dan, 5J