Taking into account the correct meaning, is this anything new? Has France withdrawn customs/immigration from even more airports?
They did indeed get it all wrong.
It was covered here.
The arrêté says:
As regards to the crossing of the external borders of the Schengen area by persons, only aerodromes classified as “port of entry” are authorised to receive extra-Schengen flights, according to the conditions and hours of operation published by the aeronautical information channels.
“Extra-Schengen” means outside of the Schengen area.
“Intra-Schengen” means within the Schengen area.
Peter wrote:
However, taking into account the correct meaning, is this anything new? Has France withdrawn customs/immigration from even more airports?
I think that if you compare the list of ports of entry published in the beginning of November to the previous list, there is no difference. You may look for recent updates to the list in the EU Official Journal.
We are still waiting for the list of customs airfields w/o immigration.
We got an email 19/10/2017, leading to the post Aviathor is reffering to. Since there was a lot of reaction to this. The GA organisation sought extra information with the french government. Today we got a new email with the information as posted in my first post. In Dutch written under here (sorry you will have to use go Google translate)
ALGEMENE REGELS :
1/ Iedereen die naar Frankrijk vliegt vanuit een INTRA of EXTRA Schengenland moet verplicht eerst lan- den op een vliegveld vermeld zoals in art 1 van de ’ Points de passage frontaliers aériens français’.
2/ Iedereen die vanuit Frankrijk naar het buitenland, INTRA of EXTRA Schengen, vliegt moet verplicht eveneens landen op een van de vliegvelden zoals hierboven vermeld, vooraleer het Franse grondgebied wordt verlaten.
I would certainly be happy to be wrong! It would be a real shame that our GA organisation is spreading false information TWICE..
Why do you need to seek extra information with the French government? Why can’t you just read the official regulations as published?
Then I would suggest you read this:
Arrêté du 24 octobre 2017 relatif au franchissement des frontières par les personnes et les marchandises sur les aérodromes
Specifically article 2 (concerning extra-Schengen flights and which I quoted earlier in this thread) and article 9 that states
Les aérodromes n’ayant pas la qualité de point de passage frontalier sont autorisés à recevoir des vols directs en provenance ou à destination de pays appartenant à l’espace Schengen, sans qu’aucune formalité liée au contrôle aux frontières des personnes ne soit requise
meaning
Aerodromes that are not ports of entry are allowed to receive flghts coming directly from, or going directly to countries that belong to the Schengen area without any sort of formalities with respect to border control of persons required.
They also add something to the effect of “If internal border controls are temporarily reinstated in accordance with the Schengen treaty, border controls may be carried out on those aerodromes”
So whoever in NL wrote that mail must have been smoking something which is not legally sold in France or got information from some Frenchman visiting a NL coffeeshop.
achimha wrote:
Why do you need to seek extra information with the French government? Why can’t you just read the official regulations as published?
That is what happens when people spread FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) and make relatively minor issues into big ones. One ends up not trusting the written legal sources and try to obtain the truth from the horse’s mouth, except that when you talk to the wrong horse you get wrong information.
I am curious as to who the horse is.
If anyone ever questions me performing an intra-Schengen flight to/from a grass field in France to any other Schengen country, I have the “arrêté” on my iPad for them to read.
No slurs on my country, @Aviathor 
, at least not on our smoking habits (as a nation, we are better at drinking than at smoking anyway). The text is in Dutch language but it is from Belgium, not from the Netherlands. And yes, I know there are those in France who like to consider BE a French-speaking country, whereas in fact there do be French speakers here but they are a minority – even if not by a large margin.
OTOH the Belgians, Northern variant, do not show up as very clever in this text they distributed – but one has to admit the French text is bewildering and confusing. The VVMV has some authority, for example my club sent out the same text to all members including yours truly.
@Boscomantico: yes yes there is indeed. Find them at https://www.vvmv.be
That is what happens when people spread FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt)
NOBODY HERE IS SPREADING FUD so can this offensive accusation not be posted again, please! All this does is it drives people away from EuroGA, leaving behind those who don’t mind getting into a fight.
To be fair to the OP, it is almost impossible to establish this stuff unless you know exactly where to look, so it would be more constructive to simply post that.
For a specific airport one can look at the AIP entry. That may be wrong and has been wrong but it is the best you will get. But there isn’t a more general overview of the customs/imjmigration situation, located at any single consistent place.
There is a lot of expertise here on EuroGA because we have such a large % of pilots who own their planes and fly a lot, including internationally – see e.g. here. However this is rare in the wider GA community so it is not surprising that some pilots have the wrong info.
Medres07 wrote:
We got an email 19/10/2017, leading to the post Aviathor is reffering to. Since there was a lot of reaction to this. The GA organisation sought extra information with the french government. Today we got a new email with the information as posted in my first post.
One month for such a reply from anywhere in the French government is suspiciously fast. Which proves that in the area of conflict between cost, quality and time, you can never achieve all three at the same time. Since cost was zero and the response was too fast, its quality can’t be good. 
