Looking at the hourly upkeep of some airport items I can only shake my head a bit. Starting an airfield small is a chore because some things cost money in such an amount that one cannot do without proceeding fast to medium flights.
The biggest chunk of cash goes into the runway. My 800m runway eats up 2k of Dollars each payment period. For what? It is a field made of concrete with some blinking lights basically. While I can understand the thing consumes power it consumes the same amount of power as 1000 streetlights. When doing GA operations you need a big number of stands to offset that cost or go broke. Which leads to the same problem:
Small stands cost 500$ per hour or whatever recurring time is meant and they also represent mostly fields of concrete with some floodlights attached. Compared with the money you make with GA which is 800$ per flight for landing and take-off and a parking fee of 25$ per hour this is the road to ruin. You cannot make an airfield with GA only - you go broke with those numbers - automatically. In case of the stands, we already pay for repairs, we pay for the ramp agents working there but the overall 500$ hurt too much. It simply kills GA. It even penalizes you having it at all.
There are other examples of buildings and items that are too expensive.
Example: service car stands for remote stands. 100$. WHY? It is a parking lot made of asphalt or concrete without lights and whatnot. The service car alone costs 100$ per interval on top of that not counting the wages for the 4 ramp agents it transports. The funny part: a normal car stop for unloading passengers and employees only costs 10$. Same with bus stops 50$ for remotes, 30$ for normal ones, but hey! Contractor bus stops are FREE!. These are items made of rock and once we build them, we should be fine. If they grow dirty we got janitors and if they got damaged we got service techs.
Fences…why do they cost upkeep per section? Thanks to zoning nobody would need those either, but that is not the point. This another example of an item not having to cost money once built. Seats cost money, benches cost money…i can understand this for items using water and electricity but not for decorations with no effect other than looking nice. Paying for foundation is fine as it covers electricity, water and heat for the building.
Shop contracts should not go by size. You should meet requirements like having an average number of PAX in the airport to get more stars. Instead we build the place, pay the upkeep for the shop furniture and even are fined if the shop does not meet its financial goals. Where in the world is that so? Enterpreneur’s risk I say. Have an expensive jeweler in a small airport and you go broke - as shop owner. The airport only provides the rooms - the rest is the job of the shop owner who is to pay rent and a cut of the sales. Whether the venture is successful or not is the contractor’s risk, not the airport’s so why fining us? Speaking of it: I do not want to be bothered to check every 7 days for my shops or cafes quitting business. Long-term relationships should be a nice thing to have.
We need a bit of fine-tuning of what we have already in addition to the new, shiny things to come.