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AFPEx April joke

I had one of these April fool emails from NATS.

NATS is introducing a charge for all new and existing business users of AFPEx. The cost of AFPEx has been calculated based on the level of service and resilience required by business customers.
As an existing customer with an account there is no setup charge (normally £650). To continue using the Unlimited Service (no messaging restrictions) an on-going service charge of £1995.00 a year per account will be required. If you use more than one AFTN mailbox address, each mailbox will be charged at an additional £200 per year.

From 0 to 1995.00. I will ditch my account now.
I guess their customer base will go down by 95%

United Kingdom

I am not sure this is a joke…

I didn’t get this email but somebody else I know has.

Maybe they are hitting just customers whose have a company name?

You can get AFTN access via other ways. There are companies in the USA that offer it. It’s not dirt cheap though… There may also be AFTN-to-email gateways, for those who want a receive-only service.

NATS also still offer a fax service. They don’t like it, I am sure, but they have to offer a means for foreign pilots (who don’t have a UK address and thus cannot get an AFPEX account) to file flight plans. It is an ICAO obligation for an ARO. The next argument is… what is an “ARO”? And email2fax is very cheap (I use Interfax).

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

I guess their customer base will go down by 95%

Given that they won’t lose a single penny in revenue, and will save a bunch in costs, I doubt they will care.

What does AFPEX offer over one of the free filing services (Autorouter, EuroFPL, etc)? Or even the dirt cheap options (Skydemon, Rocketroute, Homebriefing)?

I can see why its useful for airfields who need to receive incoming AFTN messages, but surely the rest of us can live without?

EGEO

I think having an AFTN address can be quite valuable to contact certain types of airports for PPR etc. So I was always envious towards the UK pilots who could get one for free. But I would probably not pay for it.

www.ing-golze.de
EDAZ

What does AFPEX offer over one of the free filing services (Autorouter, EuroFPL, etc)? Or even the dirt cheap options (Skydemon, Rocketroute, Homebriefing)?

AFPEX is a (this is not a joke) very robust and simple tool which (this is not a joke) always works, and works from anywhere to anywhere. It is a dumb terminal into the AFTN so you know that the message will be sent as generated. There is no database involved and the message is delivered directly and immediately.

It can also be used to do stuff other than flight plan related. There are various queries you can send out, not all of them documented to private users I think NATS had to put in some measures to prevent vandalism, the potential for which is obvious.

I know UK pilots mostly hate it (there were huge “anti” threads run on the UK sites) and it does need a windows computer to run which makes it useless for most of today’s fashionable crowd but I always carry a winXP laptop on all significant trips anyway – simply because it does “everything”. I am about to throw out my new android tablet as yet another piece of IT junk which does approximately 79.94% of that I need to do, and that is only after I wasted a few days of my life setting it up.

I have found AFPEX to be a very valuable backup method for getting a flight plan filed when the web-based service I used as the primary method failed to work for some reason. In one scenario, there was some sort of invalid character in some web form and it kept throwing it out. The cause was never found, and here is me in +35C heat at LGKR using AFPEX to get the flight plan into the system. The destination airport (LGKC) was open for only a 2 hour slot so…

I think having an AFTN address can be quite valuable to contact certain types of airports for PPR etc

I too thought it would be good for that purpose but fairly extensive tests showed it to be almost useless. The only airport (IIRC) which ever responded was Sitia LGST who have the very smart Mr Dimitris who replied by email (I always included a fax number and an email address, and added that a reply via AFTN will also reach me). I think it was useless because nobody seeing the message was prepared to believe that a mere pilot would have AFTN access. Due to union driven job demarcation, the person reading AFTN messages is rarely the person in charge of PPR/PNR – this is why, at many airports, if you send a Customs PNR message to Operations they will almost never walk the 3m across the corridor and give it to the policeman. To make the point it is not their job, they will probably tear it up. Also I think most of the people who get the AFTN messages cannot speak English and they understand only the ARR etc standard messages.

I have not yet received that NATS email so my guess is that they picked out all those accounts which were in a company name. A lot of people run their plane in a company and these pilots are inadvertently getting screwed. They ought to re-apply for access in their own name.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

I have found AFPEX to be a very valuable backup method for getting a flight plan filed when the web-based service I used as the primary method failed to work for some reason.

That’s fair – I have had submission failures from all of the flight plan tools I use – this is why I maintain accounts with Autorouter, EuroFPL and Skydemon, along with the PDF flight plan form and an email to fax account as a final backup. I have an AFPEX account but don’t use it.

it does need a windows computer to run which makes it useless for most of today’s fashionable crowd

I shall take that as a compliment I run AFPEX on OS X – it’s written in java and works perfectly well without any hacks.

I also haven’t received that email.

EGEO

So, for someone like me, who uses Olivia when in France, and phones the Bria when that fails , and lives outside the UK, what would be the cheapest option when traveling from UK, which I do a couple of times a year from a gliding site not in the system?

It's supposed to be fun.
LFDW

what would be the cheapest option when traveling from UK, which I do a couple of times a year from a gliding site not in the system?

IFR: Autorouter or EuroFPL
VFR: EuroFPL

EuroFPL permits up to 10 filings free of charge in a rolling 30-day period

EGEO

Obviously NATS missed a huge trick by making AFPEX a Java app instead of a normal website, which would have been much more useful (Ipads, etc).

Their explanation was that it had to run in some ATC environments where this was needed. IMHO, it was done in Java to justify the subcontractor’s huge fee (Comsoft in Germany?).

One can run it on an Ipad over remote desktop but you need to be quite into IT to make it run.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Just had this from Rocketroute – seems that might be able to offer a cheaper answer for business users who need their own AFTN address.

They also link to this NATS release – access will continue to be free for individual recreational users.

Last Edited by jwoolard at 02 Apr 09:00
EGEO
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