Jason - do you still need to wear cannulas in your aircraft? I assumed the built in pressurisation and or oxygen system in your aircraft meant you would be able to fly at altitudes without.
No, due to the pressurisation you do not need oxygen. There are emergency O2 generators in case of a loss of pressurisation but the aircraft can also descend fast if needed. Gear out, speedbrakes out, c.5k+/minute. But the Mirage is only certified to FL250.
Interestingly, the Meridian which is certified to FL300 (but due to lacking RVSM can only effectively do FL280), has a dedicated oxygen system for the pilot and generators for the passengers. I believe this is a certification requirement for the higher altitude.
Most of my IFR flying is without oxygen. I never had problems flying IFR in France below oxygen levels and hardly ever had detours because of that (even during the week).
Frankfurt is FL140 at least since they opened the new runway so a small detour is required unless they can squeeze you in (not that often these days).
When filing a flight plan with RocketRoute, I can give it a flight level window and it will search for a route. In case I really don't want to fly at oxygen levels, the route can be a lengthy one but the actual route will usually be just fine. If I file > FL120, I make sure to carry oxygen (well, builtin system) and if I file lower with lots of detours, I make sure the endurance matches. In both cases I usually get just what I want even though Eurocontrol could not file it.
As a new IR holder, is there an easy way to find out the different rules that each country apply for IFR routing? (I haven't checked the AIPs yet I might add)
In Sweden and Denmark, I have learned that it's ok to file a direct route to the beginning of the star. I could remove ~40nm from the route suggested by eurofpl to EHGG by doing DCTs through Sweden and Denmark before I joined an airway just prior to entering German airspace.
Did my first longer IFR flight yesterday and of course I was given a visual approach :-)
In general terms, the route which is developed by a tool like FPP and which is thus Eurocontrol validated, will have start and end points which correctly connect to a published SID/STAR.
That is how "classical IFR" works everywhere.
Departure - SID - enroute - STAR - IAP - Destination.
If one/both of the airports don't have a SID/STAR then the normal procedure is to use a DCT to connect the route to the airport.
Very occassionally you end up with a DCT whose length exceeds the MAX DCT distance for the relevant airspace (e.g. UK is 100nm below FL100, 50nm above that - or something like that; Albania is ZERO so you cannot fly to any airport there unless it has a SID/STAR, but they have only one airport anyway which is Tirana which is OK) and then you have to hack it by inserting some waypoint so you have two DCTs.
There are all kinds of hacks one can use to get routes to validate. Some are less clever than others; for example you can easily fool the system by filing a series of DCTs with waypoints specified as VORs or even lat/longs, but if the route crosses any e.g. mil airspace then you won't be able to fly it for real and will drive ATC mad.
I have some notes here which are hopefully not to out of date.
To literally achieve what you want i.e. replace a SID or a STAR, the only way I know of is to file Z or Y and fly those sections under VFR.
As a new IR holder, is there an easy way to find out the different rules that each country apply for IFR routing?
I guess you use RocketRoute? It's become the standard pretty much and is well worth the money. Every FIR (flight information region) has a limit for DCTs. Unfortunately that limit is 0NM for most FIRs. You can find out by inserting a small DCT and validating the plan. It will tell you what the DCT limit is for the FIR and what your longest DCT leg of your plan is.
RocketRoute (and others) will never suggest DCTs but you can put them in as you like. I usually don't do it because in real life, you get better routings than what is filed in your flight plan so it's usually not worth the effort. If ATC try to put me on a route that is longer than what I have filed, I tell them "minimum fuel" because you're supposed to plan for the filed route + the required reserves.
Did my first longer IFR flight yesterday and of course I was given a visual approach :-)
Good ATC always offer visual approaches to GA aircraft in VMC because it is a lot faster than flying out 10NM to intercept a localizer and block half of the sky with a small aircraft. However, you can always refuse and request an instrument approach.
the route which is developed by a tool like FPP and which is thus Eurocontrol validated, will have start and end points which correctly connect to a published SID/STAR.
Not necessarily. A lot of airports do not require the route to terminate at the start of arrival / IAF. It's very common in Germany that it can be anywhere within e.g. 35NM with no published procedure to get from there. I was puzzled about this and thought it was a bug in the Eurocontrol system but it's working as designed. It adds extra flexibility.
I'd be interested to know how you can hack the eurocontrol system with DCT's (on a non-buggy day). There are now numerous RAD rules to check whether a DCT is allowed.
Sometimes, it appears to allow a DCT that should have been rejected. In these cases, the checker usually has found a coincident airway that was allowed and accepted the plan on these grounds.
I'm afraid your notes are a bit dated in some parts...
I have not tried this within the past year, but one method which would work in any airspace where DCTs were allowed was a construct like this
DEP DCT WP1 DCT WP2 DCT WP3... DCT DEST
where the waypoints are specified using either the VORrrrddd method or the lat,long method. You do not use any waypoint names. In those cases IFPS checks (checked) only the MAX DCT parameter.
Obviously the filed route might not be actually flyable for any number of reasons, so the pilot doing this does need to use his brain...
IFPS have only themselves to blame for people doing this, because they set up a "technology whizzkid" system which was very hard to use, almost impossible pre-2008 (when the autorouting tools came in), they tried to stop the tools working by various devious means e.g. re-doing the validation gateway as HTTPS and when that got worked around (a few hours later) changing it to a Flash site (which got worked around a bit later but the developer gave up wasting his time) and generally obstructing access to "normal people".
One employee there told me a few years ago that they were unable to open up access because every time it was suggested, the jet flight service providers (Jepp and others) would kick up a massive fuss because their business would be damaged. Anybody can set up an operation for booking hotels, and even overflight permits are done by numerous people, but developing IFR routes is supposed to be a proper black art.
I remember some IFR trips in 2006-2007 when I was sitting on the tarmac at some airport, trying to work out a way to fly to the next place, before the laptop or phone battery ran out. And I have met many foreign pilots who remain totally baffled by the crazy system.
But eventually the autorouting tools forced the issue into the open and in 2009 IFPS opened up the Route Suggest facility which is usable much of the time. But even now they do not offer any access to proper route development i.e. a route which contains level changes by specifying a min, max and a preferred level. For lower airways this often produces much better routes and avoids the silly "FL160-180 all the way for 900nm" situation where you want to cross the Alps.
At one conference I went to, Hendrix (I guess you know him) claimed they do not have the computer power to do autorouting.
If you know specific things which are no longer applicable, please post them or drop me an email and I will edit the writeup.
I've never seen the MID000000 trick work, that's why I was asking for a specific example.
I doubt that MIDxxxyyy is really doing the wrong thing; most eRAD rules are coded as airspace crossing restriction, and these are easy to evaluate correctly for any way to define a coordinate.
If MIDxxxyyy helps, then it's more likely because the NAA/ANSP botched the rule implementation.
But there are silly ways to code a rule. The much hated ED3115A is an example. They likely intended to prevent anyone from crossing Frankfurt airspace below FL135. What they coded is: the flight plan is rejected if it crosses Frankfurt airspace and it does not cross german airspace anywhere above FL135. So you can file a flight plan that climbs to FL136 over the lake constance, or over Rostock, then descends to FL050 again and crosses Frankfurt at FL050. Ok, they wouldn't let you cross at this altitude... unless you squawked 7600 (i.e. actually had a radio failure)...
I've also never seen the GAT trick do anything. I've looked at the eRAD's there are very few that are different for GAT vs. OAT, but I am not aware of any that would make a difference for me.
I totally agree with you that Eurocontrol is kind of like a sourcerer apprentice, creating a system that is so complex even they can no longer manage. I'm still regularly finding bugs in their stuff, and that's surely why the require anyone who signs a contract with them to report bugs back 8-)
Hendrix (I haven't heard of any other Hendrix than Jimi and not in this context 8-)) is right, autorouting in the ECAC region is resource consuming, mainly because the eRADs are done in a way to make it extremely hard to do routing.
IFPS route suggest didn't produce good results for me; for one thing, a significant part of my ops is Y/Z (being based on an airfield without IAPs), and I do my flying at a lower level. In the absence of weather, I prefer approximately FL080 (which works best for my normally aspirated aircraft).
The MID000000 trick definitely worked; I used it myself. It used to be necessary if filing IFR below CAS (let's forget the various reasons why actually filing that is usually useless or even illegal) but in the past few years IFPS seems to have stopped rejecting such low level flight plans - perhaps because they were getting so many rejections from UK pilots trying it, trying to be "proper" and filing "I" at 2400ft 
Hendrix is/was one of Eurocontrol's top evangelists. Last time I saw him, he (or one of his mates) was rushing off to some South American country to "show them how to do it properly". I felt sorry for the poor buggers in Venezuela or whatever; they can really do without this kind of crap.
is right, autorouting in the ECAC region is resource consuming, mainly because the eRADs are done in a way to make it extremely hard to do routing.
I don't believe that, (a) because we have somewhat moved on from the days of this (or maybe I am wrong and IFPS runs on an array of them) and (b) they have an in-house tool (I believe it was called Daedalus or something like that) which they promised to open to public access as early as 2005, but which was blocked by politics. This tool was very fast - a small fraction of a second to develop a route. I saw it myself, on a visit. You could stick a load of constraints on it, etc. They had a number of desks, 24/7, running this, for big commercial people whose flight plans would not validate. Usually these would be repeating flight plans (airlines) which stopped working because of some airspace change and the airline would predictably go berserk because the 747 or whatever was loaded but could not fly.
