A disaster
in the making.

Nobody is on top of the fight against Bush's massive 366 percent GA fuel tax increase and user fee scheme any better then AOPA...with the possible exception of NBAA, who is making plenty of noise too. And in trying to sort this garbage out, we banter around lots of awful “what if” scenarios, trying to figure out what this monster of a proposal will do to GA and business aviation if it actually becomes law. But as much as we like to think we know how really bad user fees could be, trust me, we really haven't a clue.

Until now.

Thanks to the extremely thorough reporting from AOPA's Thomas Horne, we now can get a look deep into the dark underbelly of the horrific user fees that GA pilots in Europe must endure just to poke holes in the sky. Horne recently went to Europe and rode along on a typical 350 NM IFR flight from London's Biggin Hill Airport to Egelsbach Airport, near Frankfurt-Main International Airport in Germany. He made the flight with Jan Brill, editor in chief of Germany's Pilot und Flugzeug Magazine, and photographer Mark Wagner on Brill's 1964 Piper Twin Comanche.

This article – found in the latest AOPA Pilot Magazine – is absolutely REQUIRED READING for any pilot, any future flight student, or anyone who manufactures or sells stuff that pilots and airplane owners use. This request from me is not open to debate, you absolutely must go here and read Horne's article, because if this doesn't scare the holy crap out of you, then you don't deserve to call yourself an aviator.

I'm not going to steal AOPA's thunder on this, so just follow this link and read the entire article, including Horne's sidebar on the Euro-fees. There is also an AOPA video of the flight here. After you are finished, PASS THE LINK BELOW TO AS MANY FRIENDS AS YOU CAN (copy and paste the following URL into an email and forward):

http://www.aopa.org/pilot/features/2007/feat0704.html

We need to band together and get maximum coverage for AOPA on this article...it will open a lot of eyes, and shock any pilot who reads it. I am serious, we need to daisy-chain this article, force your buddies to read it, shove it in their face if you have to, leave it in the break room at work, email it all over the country...this is MANDATORY!!!