Greek Summer Ops Lowdown

Key Points

All Greek islands will be extremely busy this summer. Athens too.
Very few slots are made available to bizav flights, overnight parking is scarce, even quick turn arounds are extremely difficult in some cases.
Watch out for extra fees at LGMK/Mykonos, LGKR/Corfu and LGKO/Kos.
Consider drop-and-go’s, with parking at airports on the Greek mainland, Cyprus, or Turkey.

There are loads of island airports in Greece, but there’s a special collection which are managed by a German company called Fraport.

The 14 Greek airports managed by Fraport.

“Special” just because operating to these particular airports has become increasingly challenging since their privatisation in 2017. Fraport initially struggled to deal with providing parking to non-scheduled and business aviation, and new slot procedures were introduced to try to better manage the volume of requests being made.

How long can I park my aircraft on the islands?

Not long. There are two places to check how long you can stay on the ground at these airports – and you need to check both.

The first is the PPR Handbook Fraport have published which includes this info in handy chart form, plus a bunch of extra info about how to actually go about applying for PPR.

The second place to check is the Notams, and this applies to ALL Greek airports. With peak summer season coming in July/August, expect to see even more restrictive max-time-on-ground Notams get published.

The real stingers on this list of airports are LGSR/Santorini and LGMK/Mykonos, where parking for bizav flights will be limited to just 40 minutes!

Watch out for extra fees!

There are some extra costs at three airports in the summer: LGMK/Mykonos, LGKR/Corfu and LGKO/Kos.

Thanks to the OPSGROUP member who alerted us to this!

The short story is this: all bizav flights have to use the dedicated GA Terminal at these airports in the summer months, where you will get charged an extra 2000 Euros per passenger-carrying sector flight (so if a flight has pax inbound and outbound, 4000 Euros will be charged). VAT is charged on top of this to non-EU operators.

It doesn’t matter which handler you use – they all quote the same costs for this.

There’s no mention of these charges in Fraport’s Airport Charges documents published on their site.

A note on LGAV/Athens

Once a haven for weary bizjet operators, at LGAV/Athens airport there always used to be a cosy spot on some remote parking stand for GA/BA aircraft to rest for the night after dropping their passengers on one of the islands.

Well, those days are gone. Expect to see a version of this LGAV Notam get published over and over again this summer:

LGAV A1518/24 - DUE TO INCREASED NUMBER OF ACFT ON GROUND, PPR FOR LONG STAY 
(MORE THAN 12 HR) OF ANY ACFT IN ATHINAI/ELEFTHERIOS VENIZELOS INTL 
AIRPORT. 29 APR 12:59 2024 UNTIL 28 MAY 23:59 2024. CREATED: 29 APR 13:00 2024

As things get busier, this is likely to reduce again – as low as four hours during the summer peak.

Good options for parking?

In Greece, we’ve heard reports from OPSGROUP members on these ones: LGTS/Thessaloniki, LGSM/Samos, LGIO/Ioannina, LGKV/Kavala, LGRX/Araxos. In Cyprus, there’s LCPH/Paphos. And then there’s always the option of Turkish coastal airports, the likes of LTBJ/Izmir and LTFE/Bodrum.

Good options for parking.

Here’s a couple more we heard about since we published this article:

“LGBL/Volos – a joint use air base 90nm north of Athens. We just relocated our aircraft there on our trip to Athens for around 9 days. Super easy in and out. Stayed at Volos town about 15 miles away. Limited operating days and hours so check notams. They have limited airline service also. Rental cars are available. All in all a great experience for storing our aircraft until the boss was ready to return to the US.”

“LGIR/Heraklion – we operated into LGIR a few days ago. Everything very easy and Skyserv did a really great job of taking care of our pax and us. Lots of nice hotels in the area around the city, some nice sights if you have some days off. Departure was also very smooth, catering, fuelling, gpu everything worked exactly as it should. The fees were also very moderate. LGIR is also a good candidate for parking if you can’t get it anywhere else.”

Know of any other good options? Let us know: news@ops.group

Greek Summer Ops Lowdown