Actually, I never tried to cancel IFR before take-off. Cancelling the minute you are airborne is an option but this is not solving the problem waiting for the clearance. Of of good topics when meeting some of local ATCc, try to remember to open that.
tomjnx wrote:
VFR flightplans are mostly useless
I fly VFR (regret no IR or arguably a suitable aircraft). However, why do you ‘lucky’ IR pilot think a VFR Flight Plan is ‘virtual useless’?
To start with it’s ‘mandatory’ to ‘file’ VFR when leaving the UK, destination Europe.
I currently file my VFR FP from the facility in Skydemon – plan the route and ‘click’ file a VFR FP.
I agree that sometimes / often ‘en-route’ controllers don’t seem to be in receipt of my plan, but destinations nearly always are.
SD prompts to ‘add additional addresses’ – but I’m not sure what additional ones (over and above the default ones) might be worth adding, OR how to find / what their codes are.
However, why do you ‘lucky’ IR pilot think a VFR Flight Plan is ‘virtual useless’?
To start with it’s ‘mandatory’ to ‘file’ VFR when leaving the UK, destination Europe.
Of course, a FP is mandatory in most border crossings, etc. It just doesn’t give you any clearance, or indeed any assurance that you can fly it, does nothing for PPR/PNR, etc.
Peter wrote:
Of course, a FP is mandatory in most border crossings, etc. It just doesn’t give you any clearance, or indeed any assurance that you can fly it, does nothing for PPR/PNR, etc
Sure – understand that, but it’s nice when (at least at times) they seem to know you are coming.
I’ve have the Belgium’s (unprompted) give me a ‘direct’ to one of my distant waypoints to cut-out a planned dog-leg to avoid an area I thought best avoided – that was nice and meant somebody must have been looking at my little VFR plan.
I’d say “copy BUT what about ‘R’ area so and so”, and he /she would say “not active, cleared direct xxxxx".
well, many pilots are considering VFR flight plan as uselles but I don`t agree. Exactly for reasons above and beyond that. Even VFR flight plan is sometimes lost and you need to inform ATC on you intention anyway, it`s worth to have it for longer flights. SAR is also a factor.
if only filling of VFR flight plan is as easy as IFR via autorouter…..unfortunatelly this is outside Eurontrol focus area.
WarleyAir wrote:
However, why do you ‘lucky’ IR pilot think a VFR Flight Plan is ‘virtual useless’?
Because about half of my filed purely VFR flight plans got lost somewhere in the chain and didn’t reach destination, yet this had zero operational impact. Flight Information Service never bothered to look up the flight plan, still wanted to hear all the details over the radio.
The answer from ATC is clear – you can cancel IFR even before departure, no problem with that. Just make sure you clearly indicate to aht ATC you are cancelling IFR only, not the entire flight plan. So this might be a solution. One can react that VFR flight plan might would had been filled using different routing but I guess this is not an issue – nobody usually cares what you have in your VFR flight plan, they`ll ask anyway for your routing…
I have flown with 2 VFR flight plans multiple times.
One opened when I took off and another opened by Brussels radar, because they couldn’t find any flight plan due to wrong addressing from RR.
Where can I find a list of these VFR flight plan addresses (Europe)? Can’t really add additional addresses (Skydemon) without knowing what and what areas these addresses cover.
These extra addresses are supposed to be added automatically by the tool used to file the VFR FP.
Traditionally, in VFR FP addressing, you address the FP to
I have some background here
But there are many variations between countries.
Skydemon uses EuroFPL for FP filing and EuroFPL should be taking care of all the addressing.
So you should not need to manually insert addresses unless doing something unusual e.g. you are doing a touch and go at some airport along the route and you want to copy them on the FP (why, I have no idea).
When, about 8 years ago, the UK shut down the FBUs and made everybody use the fairly horrid AFPEX tool, all addressing had to be done manually. I think that, after some years, the AFPEX tool actually does most or all of the required addressing for you. I noticed something like that in there. But I haven’t used it for a year or two for IFR and never used it for VFR. I keep it as a backup (it is actually very reliable – if you have something that it runs on i.e. a windows computer) but I also keep EuroFPL as a backup (they offer some number of free FPs each month) and that is much better.
For VFR I recommend EuroFPL, unless your flight planning tool already has a FP filing function.
