How different would your top five look?
*According to SkyDemon users
Words Ian Seager
18 December 2023
If beauty is in the eye of the beholder then great airfields must surely be in the eye of the visitor. Every four weeks, SkyDemon tallies up the total number of movements by SkyDemon users at every airfield in Europe during the previous two years.
SkyDemon also notes how many unique customers visited each airfield at least once, and that produces the app’s airfield rankings. This data came from the very latest rankings produced at the end of November 2023.
There’s clearly a bit of a southern bias here, and while that could be that airfields are just better down here, we think it’s probably more to do with the distribution of pilots, given there’s some cracking airfields north of the M4! Feel free to use this link to post your top airfields in the related forum thread.
A well-deserved top spot for Turweston (affectionately known as Turdy by many). This Northamptonshire airfield combines hard and grass runways with a friendly welcome. There has been significant investment over the last few years, and the tower building (which also hosts the LAA) is home to a great café. Despite the ample seating (which includes tables on the balcony), it can get very busy – make sure you plan accordingly, particularly when the days get warmer.
This has to be one of the success stories of recent years. Dan Subhani has completely changed the feel of the airfield. Dan has invested in loads of seating, an astroturf runway, an extremely large model of a rocket and, most importantly, a wood-fired pizza oven! But even when that’s not fired up there’s plenty of other great food on the menu. Sandown (also known as Dandown for obvious reasons) is a brilliant example of a no-nonsense airfield, summed up perfectly by the slogan on the Sandown T-shirts, ‘No PPR, No Hi-Viz, No Miserable People’. Just brilliant.
We all like to fly somewhere for that £100 bacon roll, but sometimes you want a destination with something other than a plate of hot food – and Duxford has that in spades. As the home of the Imperial War Museum, it offers what is probably the best aviation museum in the country. In addition to its world-class offerings, there is a hard and a grass runway and you’ll almost always see something interesting in the circuit or overhead. The museum is visited by more than 400,000 people every year, so you’ll get all of the facilities that you’d expect from a major attraction (including average quality, overpriced food).
If you have never flown in before, the airport at Lee-on-Solent can look a bit intimidating, what with the co-location of the Fleetlands ATZ, the proximity of Solent’s controlled airspace, various noise sensitive areas… and a bird sanctuary a few miles to the east. Don’t be put off, like most things in aviation it’s less complicated than it looks. It’s a very short walk from the terminal to the sea, and a pleasant stroll along the beach will bring lots of refreshment options, plus the hovercraft museum!
I’ve come to think of Popham as the spiritual home of recreational aviation, at least in this part of the world. There’s no PPR, no yellow jackets, and when the air/ground radio operators go home they don’t roll up the runway and take it with them. The airfield remains available until 8pm and with a self-serve avgas pump that takes credit cards you can fuel up and carry on flying when other airfields are verboten. The offset approach on 26 is interesting too!
