Peter wrote:
quite amazing. How many countries have that? Basically this means that if you depart in Country X, the ATS system of X has no idea what happens to you after you left their borders, and in particular where you landed.
I find that quite reasonable. Why would the ATS system of country X care what happens to you? All responsibilities, both for ATC, FIS and SAR rests with the country you’ve entered.
The only thing I can think of that matters is for AIS of the country of departure to provide item 19 of the flight plan in case of SAR action, but that is in any case done only on request.
In Switzerland a flight plan from an untowered field becomes active automatically
Interesting. Does that mean that once a FP (presuming VFR i.e. “V” here?) is filed, the ATC system auto-generates a DEP at the filed EOBT plus something, IF the departure AD is not on some database of towered ADs?
I still find
They don’t receive the arrival message for flights which land across the border
quite amazing. How many countries have that? Basically this means that if you depart in Country X, the ATS system of X has no idea what happens to you after you left their borders, and in particular where you landed.
Same in Germany.
Interesting, there are some differences nationally. In Switzerland a flight plan from an untowered field becomes active automatically, without any communication other than the flight plan itself. That’s why we have hundreds of false alarms per year (I read ca. 650/year), because pilots think they could just let it expire without managing it. I always thought this automatic flight plan activation was odd. On the other hand, a flight plan should always be proactively managed and then it wouldn’t be an issue anyways.
Clipperstorch wrote:
Called them up: It is a system limitation. They don’t receive the arrival message for flights which land across the border. The system then simply archives the flight plan after a few hours.
That’s a bit silly, but it doesn’t matter from a SAR perspective. The responsibility for activating SAR if you are overdue rests on Salzburg ATC and not on the German AIS.
They don’t receive the arrival message for flights which land across the border
That is totally amazing.
Called them up: It is a system limitation. They don’t receive the arrival message for flights which land across the border. The system then simply archives the flight plan after a few hours.
Yeager wrote:
Never be shy of phoning up the AIS and confirm status of the flight plan!
Or, in this case, call them after the fact to learn what happened and what you could have done differently.
Clipperstorch wrote:
But I can see a DEP message in the flight plan’s history.
You´re right. The ack. msg. does indicate that an actual departure was recorded.
As Airbone_Again suggested. Never be shy of phoning up the AIS and confirm status of the flight plan! Better than seeing a military helicopter hovering over your airplane 30+ minutes after landing! ;-)
Yeager wrote:
To me it sounds like your FPL was never actually activated in the first place. Was your DEP (departure aerodrome) controlled or uncontrolled?
That might explain why Salzburg answered with go ahead instead of just asking me to report the next VRP. Guess I should then feel lucky to have been accepted without flightplan. Departure was from an uncontrolled field. They often offer to open the flightplan if the flight crosses a border though in this case I don’t remember if they did. But I can see a DEP message in the flight plan’s history.
