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Briefing services logging your briefing - is it worth anything?

Some of the services say they keep logs – examples

  • the NATS notam website
  • Avbrief.com
  • various European ones

Has there ever been a case where somebody managed to get out of something, by proving they went to the said website?

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

I think ti tends to be more if there is a fatal accident it avoids the comment in the report that there was no record of the pilot obtaining a weather briefing. I think at least with the FAA if there was a weather related investigation, showing you obtained a briefing would certainly help.

Last Edited by JasonC at 20 Aug 14:25
EGTK Oxford

In the US it may also help you getting out of a TFR violation. If you are on the record asking for it and the briefer says there isn’t one, then you should be off the hook.

PS: leaving the legal aspect aside, the briefer also has PIREPS and – sometimes – local knowledge that can be very useful.

Last Edited by 172driver at 20 Aug 18:38

When I went flying with a Swiss instructor, he saved 2 or 3 extracts from the Swiss briefing site to his Dropbox account in order that in case of a fatal accident, his wife could prove to the insurance that he got this briefing. The information itself to me was rather incomplete and meaningless. But he assured me that there have been cases in Switzerland where an insurance payout was refused after fatal weather related crashes because the last login to the briefing site under that pilot’s login was a few weeks earlier.

All my objections were shrugged off with the statement that you wouldn’t want your family to have to go through proving that you got the briefing if you crashed.

Some of my objections are: Life insurance should pay whenever you get killed and it wasn’t deliberate; simple neglect shouldn’t preclude such a payment. Other insurances are worthless if they preclude payments for cases which involve neglect, because all accidents do. And first and foremost, there are many sources where I collect my briefing information, and the sorry ass Swiss site (Homebriefing) isn’t one of them.

Last Edited by Rwy20 at 20 Aug 19:31

Rwy20 wrote:

the sorry ass Swiss site (Homebriefing) isn’t one of them.

Homebriefing is Austrian, the “sorry ass Swiss” one is skybriefing. Compared to that site, homebriefing is actually fairly good

LSZK, Switzerland

tomjnx wrote:

Compared to that site, homebriefing is actually fairly good

True, and I mixed them up because before, Homebriefing was also used in Switzerland.

Homebriefing was a business run by Vienna ATC, with unlimited flight plans for flights which had at least one end in Austria or Switzerland. I used them in my VFR days but stopped when I discovered that they dispose of VFR flight plans by simply sending them to the departure ARO. That was a great way to make most of the French and Spanish ones go missing

It was a disorganised outfit, IME. But they were the first ever in Europe to offer electronic (online) FP filing. I heard about them from a Greek pilot, around 2004!

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

While I tend to use Rocket Route for IFR, I still keep my homebriefing.com account which seems to be able to provide valid routes when RR is stumped. Not sure why this arises as these programmes presumably use a common route algorithm?

Oxford (EGTK), United Kingdom

Peter wrote:

It was a disorganised outfit, IME. But they were the first ever in Europe to offer electronic (online) FP filing. I heard about them from a Greek pilot, around 2004!

The first version of the Swedish self-briefing system (AROweb) was launched in 2001 (according to the developer’s web site). But I can’t say for sure that it included FP filing.

ESKC (Uppsala/Sundbro), Sweden
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