Dave
At Camden Airport there are two charges, i,e. Airservices Australia
movement charges because we have a control tower on weekends (generally 9am
to 5pm), and Camden Airports Ltd (CAL) movement charges, levied by the
airport owner - the same private consortium that owns Bankstown and Hoxton
Park. Unfortunately the Federal Govt was not interested in splitting these
3 Sydney Basic airports up and sold them as one job lot for around $211
Million. There was no way that Camden Council was about to buy it - I
doubt they would have if they had been even offered Camden separately at a
fair price. It's not "core business" as they say these days.
We do not have Avdata involved at Camden. Just as well, their records seem
to be pretty crazy some times, as others on this list have attested. I
recall once that one of our tugs got a bill for being at Coffs Harbour,
even though it was at Forbes at the time for one of our camps. Like others
have said, some aircraft owners deliberately and illegally use false
registrations when making calls at these Avdata patrolled airports.
At Camden, Airservices simply records the regos given to the controllers in
the tower during taxi/circuit calls, and based on MTOW they send you a bill
accordingly.
Once, we had a chap flying from Bankstown to Camden for some
maintenance. He called up the tower to ask if he'd get hit with landing
charges, even though he was only there for some workshop time. The tower
told him to hold on a moment while they passed the hat around to do a
collection for the poor sod. The response from the inbound pilot was
stunned silence !
The CAL charges used to occur if your aircraft was so much as spotted
outside a hangar, whether you plan on flying it or not. One of the
groundsmen drives his ute around a simply writes down the registrations of
all the aircraft they see. Some poor GA owners that shared hangars were
getting slugged because other hangar-dwellers were pushing their aircraft
out so they could get another one out that was parked behind
it. Thankfully the situation seems to have settled down, and you have to
be on the movement areas of the field before you get your rego written
down. I believe a similar regime occurs at Bankstown. Not sure about
Hoxton Park.
If Camden want to dispute things, send them a statutory declaration
indicating you were elsewhere. It only takes some sloppy handwriting or a
keyboard slip-up when entering data to stuff things up.
Cheers
Jason
At 10:48 AM 2/02/2006, Dave Long wrote:
Speaking of user fees, I have had two bills in 2004 from Camden airport,
although I have never flown there.
Their response is unsatisfying - they want me to prove that I was never there.
Has this happened to anyone else?
Dave Long
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