There are usually ATS reporting offices (ARO) run by your CAA or national ATS provider. They will accept flight plan submissions by telephone, fax, e-mail, web page or whatever. Some (most?) countries have centralised this to a single ARO (e.g. Sweden). From discussions on EuroGA I’ve been led to believe that this doesn’t exist in the UK so that the only way you can submit a flight plan is by using some agent that has AFTN access (unless you have AFTN access yourself).
I think you can type in a flight plan at a lot of UK airports, into a terminal of some sort. Probably it is an AFPEX terminal. But the only people who will do that will be those who don’t use the tablet products (who plan with map, pen, ruler, etc) and they rarely fly abroad anyway.
The old FBUs (flight briefing units; there were two) which one could phone or fax with a flight plan, were closed about 10 years ago and replaced with the clunky AFPEX tool (available to anyone who can supply a UK address) but by then various online filing services appeared (EuroFPL being perhaps the first one) which did the job fine and continue to do so. I use EuroFPL for VFR flight plans, and some short IFR ones.
The national services are usually crippled e.g. Olivia won’t do flight plans unless at least one end is in France. Various people have tried fully non-French ones and reported they disappeared.
Airborne – nothing there that says the FP cant be filed with the tower.
I have filed many a vfr fp that simply says dct, just as if i was going from x to y vfr at night.
Airborne_Again wrote:
For cross-country flying yes. Not if you stay in the traffic circuit.
I think this is not correct, SERA expression is “vicinity of an aerodrome” …and then the tricky question !
What and where is defined, (in NM) the vicinity of an aerodrome ?
As far as I can remember this expression is taken from FAA regulation and even there it is not defined.
It is more than the traffic circuit, how about using the NDBs for navigational exercises which usually further away than the traffic circuit ? You don’t need to file a FP for this.
FAA do a 50nm cutoff between local and cross-country, probably that is what vicinity refer to?
If not, I would rather have it defined by radio range and fuel endurance (but given the operational use of FPs, you can also add gliding range if you like being restrictive)
Specifically in the UK, there is no operational use of FPs for 1/ VFR flights night or day and 2/ IFR in OCAS night and day, so simply it does not make sense to fill one…
Here, I make clear distinction between filling a proper FP that goes into the system versus passing your details to the next guy by RT or walk-in to book in at reception (unless they fill it mannually on your behalf, most abbreviated flight plans, when a proper FP is not needed, goes to the bin by end of day)…sometimes you end up with filing fp, geting ppr, bookout dep and dct, and pass full RT details along the way
The “abreviated can be considered as proper” argument is just a lawyer fudge to smooth out SERA rules on geographic locations by allowing other means of compliance (e.g. we got 1 rule but it has 30 different implementations), as pilots we should know better the operational differences (e.g. SAR, reporting…)
Specifically in the UK, there is no operational use of FPs for 1/ VFR flights night or day and 2/ IFR in OCAS night and day
Just to add:
3/ IFR in CAS where the flight plan was rejected by London Control; usually this means the CAS is some bit of Class D
So if you file a VFR or IFR FP e.g. EGKA – EGTE via SAM at 4000ft, which passes through EGHI Class D, EGHI won’t get a copy of it. You have to call up for a transit from Solent.
I am sure the UK is not the only country which does this… during my VFR (non UK) flying days I got into all kinds of funny situations.
The “abreviated can be considered as proper” argument is just a lawyer fudge to smooth out SERA rules on geographic locations by allowing other means of compliance
Yes, exactly. I don’t see what the problem is, why a FP filed on the air is somehow not good enough.
So the UK pays lip service to SERA. And in the same vein that the UK always had to negotiate special arrangements and exceptions with the EU, British pilots finds all kinds of excuses not to comply with regulations that are spelled out in the UK AIP.
I think it is about time the UK leaves EASA because the regulations obviously do not suit them.
British pilots finds all kinds of excuses not to comply with regulations that are spelled out in the UK AIP.
Can you post examples?
I think it is about time the UK leaves EASA because the regulations obviously do not suit them.
Avoid political windup comments – there is a thread dedicated to those but most people really hate seeing threads destroyed because one of a tiny number of individuals here decided yet again to have a swipe at somebody or some country.
ICAO SARPs and SERA allow for abbreviated FPLs; some countries just think that a FPL can only exist if it is written on a pice of A4 and has 18 fields.
Thunderstorm18 wrote:
I think this is not correct, SERA expression is “vicinity of an aerodrome” …and then the tricky question !“Vicinity” is unfortunately not well defined. The only definition is that “vicinity” at least includes aircraft entering, leaving and flying in the traffic circuit. I’ve taken the UK use of ATZs to mark the “vicinity”.
What and where is defined, (in NM) the vicinity of an aerodrome ?
Fuji_Abound wrote:
Airborne – nothing there that says the FP cant be filed with the tower.
Sure you can. But does “booking out” mean that you provide information for the whole route?
