Nothing less relevant than the past
Huh? You asked me to explain my comments about why I prefer the new system! The handling of email by the NCU is part of the new system. Don’t ask me to explain why I prefer it, and then critise me for telling you!
The way we do it with autorouter and the integrated GAR feature is that we can prove from the SMTP mail log that it was delivered to the NCU server and has gotten a unique mail ID there
I think you are having your own private conversation there Achim! Nobody has mentioned the Autorouter submission of GARs in this thread. Just direct submission of emails or through the online system. Perhaps your comments above were because you thought I was critising the Autoroute system. I was not. I was just explaining why I prefer the online sytem. One code leaves me 100% clear with any inspection. I don’t need to retrace server logs or show copies of fax transmission report. I don’t need to refer to any third party. One code and I can wave the police officer away. But I was NOT critising the Autoroute. I hadn’t (and nobody else had) mentioned it.
dublinpilot wrote:
I was just explaining why I prefer the online sytem.
Yes but you were giving the impression that sending the form to the NCU email was somehow the “old system” which you were talking about. In fact it’s not. It’s one email to one address and you’re done. That is like the commercial system but without a confirmation number.
Whether it was an issue to figure out the right authorities for the GAR in the past is hardly relevant today now that there is the single NCU email. One keeps reading this FUD about the NCU email method and I do not agree with that. It’s a very good system and free of charge.
Email still suffers from the same problem though…you’ve no way to prove that you’ve sent the email, and to the correct address.
Sure, you cannot beat an official receipt.
However, if you were facing a criminal prosecution (and that is necessary if the UK is going to fine you – the UK is not like some other places where a policeman who can’t speak English but carries a gun could just handcuff you and take you away, or impound your plane till you hand over €10,000, and until you find yourself a (English speaking and non-corrupt) lawyer or the €10,000 you can just p1ss in the wind) then you would dig out the SMTP log and prove the Border Force did get the email delivered to their email server, and the prosecution would collapse at that point.
That is one reason I quite like to live in the UK – despite its imperfections 
Even on speeding offences (a speciality of mine in the 1970s and 1980s ) where the police used to frame people up all day long for doing 65 in a 30 when they were only doing 45 in a 30, just because somebody was driving an XR3i, they cannot do that anymore.
The online GAR filing options give you a receipt, which is a great feature, but (IMHO) one could implement such a feature by tracing the destination SMTP log and printing that out and showing that to the policeman who says they didn’t get the GAR. It is actually quite possible that the police don’t have an easy means of verifying the generation of their own receipt either
Incidentally I wonder how the police implement their email filtering. Nowadays the spam/real ratio, for any published email address, is about 10:1 so they probably get 10k-100k spams per day. They must have a good system (probably whitelisting emails containing keywords, aircraft regs, etc) otherwise it would not work. They can’t use rubbish services like Spamcop.
I live in France and I go quite often to the UK or CI. They both have simple rules with online GAR, but France does not, it can cost up to 200 euros per leg on a flight from my local airfield to go through customs, as they need to open the airfield specifically for me, and that’s the cost at weekends.
I have a question, and cannot find the answer : what is the risk of not going through customs when leaving France or going back to France ?
Is it a matter of a fine, prison or death sentence ?!?
It would be interesting to know which French airfield charges €200 for arranging Customs+Immigration (required for the Channel Islands only) or Immigration (required for Great Britain and the Isle of Man – if I understand it right).
As regards your question, there are many known cases of a departure from France from a “non Customs” airport back to the UK, and I have never heard of any action taken. My view, worth what you are paying for it is that if you kept doing it they would eventually bust you. But it appears clear, from actual flights I happen to know about, that filing a flight plan from some small French airfield (no Customs or anything else) to say Caen, and when approaching Caen diverting to Bournemouth, nothing will happen because (I guess) you could claim weather near Caen prevented you landing there and you used the Captain’s privilege to divert. The only historical and categorical weather info they will have will be METARs and they stop at 5000ft above the aerodrome and if you were at FL100 they will not be able to prove that there weren’t convective weather below you even if the METAR was CAVOK. Plus of course you won’t be in France anymore so not available to be “interviewed”!
But doing this into France is obviously a different thing. I have no idea what system France has in place but you will be extremely visible to about 1000 people in the ATC system and it takes just one of them to pick up the phone…
Given that you live in France……….
FredPilote wrote:
Is it a matter of a fine, prison or death sentence ?!?
What I would do as the juge d’instruction in charge of your case is take your posting on EuroGA which shows intent and then make sure that gives you 5x the sentence.
Don’t do it, violating immigration law is a major offence. I’m no expert on France but I can say that in Germany your pilot license would be gone for good and you would get a hefty fine for each and every infraction and top of that some massive extra for your intent.
Orléans charges 200 euros for customs at weekends.
I am just asking what the penalty is, not for violating immigration laws, just for not taking off at an immigration airfield. I am not smuggling stuff or people, and I comply with UK customs as they make it easy to take off from anywhere with the GAR system, whereas in France, they are charging extra in Customs airfields, closing or removing some from the list, and if you actually stop at a customs airfield, they don’t even come and check you. I just want to know what risk I am taking IF I do this, but they can come and check me as I always make a flight plan, and I do not divert as Peter suggested.
I am just asking what the penalty is, not for violating immigration laws, just for not taking off at an immigration airfield.
You mean not for theft but for stealing somebody’s property?
Seriously, that’s a very stupid idea and it’s even worse to talk about it here and thereby announce your criminal intent. The consequences would be harsh and France is probably the last country I would pull such a stunt in because they have the best equipped and most competent aviation police of all states.
I am just asking what the penalty is
The answer to that will be published in the French criminal law documentation. It isn’t an EASA issue; it is national law. Admittedly I would not know where I could find that information for the UK, so maybe ask a lawyer.
My take on the way things work in France, based on speaking to great many people who live and work there, is that you can get away with a lot of stuff, until you p1ss off somebody big, or somebody who is trying to climb the “ladder of importance” and then the sky will fall down on you.
That of course is true in most of the earth’s surface (only some countries e.g. USA, N Europe, Australia, NZ are relatively transparent in criminal enforcement) and it becomes increasingly true in Europe as you go more south.
As an example of how things can work in France, in 2002 or so I bust the Les Blayais nuclear power station TRA. It was a strange flight; I had been under a radar service, with a specific squawk, and ATC said nothing. Then they asked me for my name, etc. I thought it was odd… anyway I was flying Biarritz to Shoreham nonstop.
5 months later I got a letter from the UK CAA, going after me on behalf of the DGAC who asked them to prosecute me.
I pointed out that
I got a stiff written reprimand from the CAA (for crap airmanship, etc) which they copied to the DGAC and that was as far as it went. I gathered that the French did a lot of that at the time. I suppose the TRAs were in the AIP but in my PPL (2000/2001) neither the AIP nor Notams were ever mentioned.
The maximum French fine for this offence was reportedly €10,000 plus a confiscation of the aircraft, although despite extensive enquiries in the years since I have not found a reference to this, nor anyone who got it.
Here in the UK this would not have happened. The 5 month delay alone would have probably prevented action. But of course the lack of ATC saying anything at the time while they obviously knew 100% would have also prevented it.
So I would be careful.
And the DGAC especially has been known to work in “interesting” ways…
I too would ask you not to do this. When people start to do thing like this, they have a horrible way of bringing consequenses for others.
You could easily see extra restrictions for GA brought in to your local airport, in an effort to make it more difficult for someone else to do the same thing.
The €200 charge is simply no excuse. You have it no harder than anyone else who is operating from a non-customs airport, only you have an extra option (of paying the charge if you wish). Everyone else has to stop somewhere enroute to clear customs.
There are plenty of choices along the UK/French border where you can stop, where the charges aren’t expensive. Dinard, Cherburg, Calais, Le Touquet all come to mind, none of which will charge anything like €200, and you can be in and out again in less than 1 hour if you are organised.
