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Aviation History
1961
1961 - 0328.PDF
336 FLIGHT, 16 March 1961 "Flight" photograph Are Britain's airports the most expensive in the world ? Landing Fees—Plus By G. L. MARCHAULT BEFORE attempting any survey of airport charges it isimperative to eradicate two widely held fallacies. The firstis that all the operator has to pay is the appropriate landing fee. In many cases nothing could be further from the truth. Jt issimply not enough to quote the landing fee and leave it at that. Honolulu has the lowest landing fee, for a Boeing 707-320, of anyairport in the world—a mere 14s 3d, but there is a State tax of 3| cents per US gallon and a local tax of 3i per cent on the basiccost of the fuel, neither of which is refundable. This means that the total bill presented for a Boeing which has uplifted 14,000gal offuel is in the region of £246, which makes the 14s 3d landing fee slightly irrelevant. The second, and even more widely held, fallacy is that the fees atLondon are the highest in the world. This has been stated so often by so many people, some of whom should know better, that onecould be forgiven for believing it. Among the 40 countries listed in the accompanying charts there are no fewer than seven charginghigher fees, and some of these overtop the London charges by a considerable margin. Airports are very expensive to operate and maintain but theyalone are not sufficient for the needs of air transport. Behind the scenes there has to be an adequate system of navigational aids, avast telecommunications network and air traffic control and meteoro- logical services working around the clock. In addition there arevarious ancillary services. The sole purpose of this entire organiza- tion is to further safety, regularity and efficiency of air transport.That being so, it is reasonable that air transport operators should pay their share. But this idea appears to be most unpopular with the airlines.In November 1960 the UK general manager of a major foreign airline said, inter alia: "It is apparently felt that the national corpo-rations and foreign airlines should be called upon to meet the -ft FUEL.THROUGHPUT CHARGES AND TAXE5 LANDING, LIGHTING .RADIO 1 RELATED FEES TtTJtt •^'•^W Fig I. Typical charges for a Boeing 707-320 at airports of 40 countries £100
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