Kemble landing fee warning

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Member for

20 years

Posts: 3,902

This has cropped up on the Flyer forum, but worth circulating to the broader GA community.

''One of my ex studes landed at Kemble just after 5 the other day and was presented with a £150 landing fee and told that he had landed 2 minutes out of hours (he wasn't told in the air) and everyone had to be paid half an hours overtime.
That stinks. He won't be going there again. Their loss.'' Morley. 14/4/2011

It is astonishing when a business that so relies on public goodwill and patronage should willfully apply unreasonable tariffs and penalties as though they actually wanted to drive people away.

These days, any such action is very soon in the public domain, and so it should be. Often in these situation you find a team of people doing their best, and one idiot managing to screw it up.

Original post

Member for

24 years 2 months

Posts: 16,832

Lunacy.

Moggy

Member for

17 years 5 months

Posts: 8,980

As you had paid or were paying for them, I would have insisted they all stood there for your 30 mins or got polishing your aircraft..... Failing that I would have said, right, might as well do 30 mins of circuits as you are here and I am paying for it.

Sucks, big time that.

Member for

12 years 11 months

Posts: 17

Guys

There is a similar thread on Pprune with a reply from Kemble. Below is the quote
Its not quite as clear cut as it first appears.

Balloo

"Wow, this has certainly got peoples attention and it's time to put the record straight from a Kemble point of view. This has been a very trying and difficult week for us after the tragic accident here on Friday that claimed the life of our fire service boss, Steve Mills, and we will all miss him greatly.

The aircraft in question on Monday ppr'd to say he would be arriving at 1640hrs local, the aircraft was late and hastly joined on a right base from the Gloucester direction as he was running late. The aircraft confirmed that he did not have an indemnity to land after hours and the duty FISO (equally hastly) did say that an out of hours charge may apply. The aircraft landed at 1706hrs local and a £150 charge was mentioned (not on the radio) because 6 of our staff (3 x ops and 3 x Firemen) had to stay back to deal with it, not just the landing but the subsequent taxiing and ops staff in the tower had to hang around for the pilot to appear. Anyhow, the £150 was not paid and it was not even invoiced so no fee was forthcoming, we are not in the business of giving GA pilots grief but in this case a point had to be made because of the knock on effect.

Had the pilot requested to land out of hours we would have sorted him out with a form, taken his landing fee over the phone and none of this would ever had surfaced. This is the same way we would deal with any out of hours request and if you land before 1700 local you can depart anytime afterwards (unlicensed) and long as you make the correct blind calls and had a brief prior to leaving. Most of you on here have already stated how friendly and helpful we are, this is what we will always try to acheive but unfortunately a lot of us have worked a lot of hours (above and beyond the call of duty) over the last week dealing with the aftermath of the loss of a great friend and colleague.

If we ever fall short of not giving you all a better than average service then as Operations Manager I want to know about it and I would be happy for you to contact me direct on [email]glen@cotswoldairport.com[/email] and, as always, I will try and sort out any issues that you may have."