A question to the savvy
Planning a trip from Germany to Austria VFR from a field that has no instrument approach at origin and destination
Doing it on ForeFlight and RocketRoute I get the same error
“eurocontrol invalid” and using 9500f feet as altitude. I see the airspace incredible busy but both programs insert a zfr plan which in my mind is vfr to ifr only. What am I doing wrong?
Appreciate input
Set flightplan type to vfr
I did
Automatically resets to vfr into ifr
I’ve been testing Foreflight and I don’t think it works (yet) for European autorouting as fully as is required. There are too many quirks. Also most countries in Europe do not allow an IFR (“I”) flight plan to an airport which has no instrument approaches, so you have to file “Z”.
But a VFR flight plan should be easily possible. Just pick a load of IFR waypoints and use DCTs. There is some setting in FF where you explicitly select VFR. If that doesn’t work, abandon it and file a VFR flight plan using some other service. I use EuroFPL.eu for VFR flight plans. The downside of VFR is that you may not get access to some controlled airspace.
If I file V in autorouter, it just says something like “not subject to validation” and files it.
Flying VFR between Germany and Austria, and not landing at one of the big (controlled) airports in Austria, you don’t need to file a flight plan at all.
Hi, Wolfgang here from ForeFlight support team.
VFR routing is not supported in the app yet. Not sure when it will be included, but we need to test it first as many countries have their own way to handle VFR plans. Typically VFR plans are only used for SAR in case somebody is missing. That’s the reason details are usually unknown to the next sector.
Also, Eurocontrol does not validate VFR flight plans. Only IFR and the IFR parts of Z/Y flight plans. (That’s the same message autorouter tells you)
Doesn’t FF support VFR flight plans in the USA? The mechanism should be identical in that you file via the AFTN, but in Europe you need extra addressing and there is a database of addressing rules which has to be compiled from the various AIPs.
One never uses autorouting for VFR. The ancient Jeppesen Flitestar/Flitemap had it (you could say you want to route OCAS) but it wasn’t useful in practice, partly because the rules were specified in terms of US airspace objects and categories.
Peter wrote:
Doesn’t FF support VFR flight plans in the USA? The mechanism should be identical in that you file via the AFTN, but in Europe you need extra addressing and there is a database of addressing rules which has to be compiled from the various AIPs.
Peter,
USA is different in that ForeFlight does not use the AFTN network for VFR flightplans. They are directly addressed to FSS via an API provided by Leidos who is the company that handles VFR flightplans for the FAA except Alaska. So we don’t generate any AFTN messages and everything is sent to a single point with all the data, including field 19 data. Also, there is still a choice of format content, FAA domestic or ICAO.
For Canada, we use the AFTN network, but address VFR flightplans to FIC rather than FIR. The two systems operate differently and we have several accommodations such as automatically sending field 19 data (via an SPL) along with the FPL request.
