Did anyone of you ever get one on a flight where the departure was VFR?
Happened to me the first time yesterday on departure from St. Cyr (Paris). Received an e-mail from Rocketroute about half an hour before EOBT.
Interestingly, when I called up the tower to confirm my slot time, they said I didn’t have a slot… No idea what that was about.
However, I am interested: Does the slot time on a Zulu flightplan refer to the time of take-off or to the time of IFR pick-up? It was still called a CTOT so I would guess they mean the takeoff time and the computer calculates the time of IFR pick up. But I am not 100% sure…
Slots are generated by sectors and are designed to make sure you arrive at the sector at a specific time. Therefore it does not matter if you depart VFR or IFR if the slot is from a sector where you are IFR according to your plan.
CTOT is takeoff, doesn’t matter if VFR or IFR.
autorouter decodes the slot messages and gives the sector and the reason. You can then use it to change your planning like I did on my last flight from Belgrade to Stuttgart (avoid Croatian airspace).
Did anyone of you ever get one on a flight where the departure was VFR?
This is fairly common. And Eurocontrol compiles lists with the number of flights violating the slot window. I dimly remember having seen such a list with LOWZ leading the charts of austria with 100% (4 out of 4) flights departing outside the slot window 
Yes but LOWZ is so deep in the Alps that the rest of the world doesn’t know somebody has departed from there until about 5 hours later
avoid Croatian airspace
Out of curiosity, why did you avoid it?
Emir wrote:
Out of curiosity, why did you avoid it?
Cause it was spitting out slots like there’s no tomorrow 
We see that very frequently on autorouter, Croatia is the most frequent source of substantial slots, i.e. more than a few minutes. If you read the slot message and file a flight plan avoiding the sector, you are not affected by the slot.
