GA ports of entry

Take the AIP of the destination country and look in the section AD 1.3 for a table of aerodromes which says whether international traffic is permitted. Some countries, however (UK being the most important example) allow any airfield to be used as a port of entry on request.

jgmusic wrote:

Finding the AIP for every country isn’t always that easy

autorouter.eu is your friend:

This is not a trivial issue. For example here and there are many threads on the separation of these services e.g. here. In some countries you can get Immigration almost anywhere on a PNR basis (Italy and Germany?) but not Customs.

Producing a matrix and keeping it up to date would take a lot of time.

For pilots who are based in the Schengen zone and never fly outside it (probably the great majority) this issue has almost gone away, except for a few airports which have “temporarily” set aside Schengen. For pilots based in the UK, Switzerland, Norway, Croatia, etc, it is more complicated.

Another factor is avgas availability. There are quite a few airports which have full port of entry status (Customs and Immigration) but have no avgas.

There is a very nice and free app for Android and iOS called RunwayMap: https://www.runwaymap.com/

It is designed to give you ideas where to fly to and contains a lot of information.

As Peter said, the EU + Schengen countries are so dominant in Europe that most GA traffic happens within those countries so there is not a lot of demand for that kind of information. Not enough demand for somebody to invest the effort to maintain an up to date database although given your interest in the topic, that could be something you contribute to European GA?

If you plan a route on autorouter, it has some information on customs/immigration airports for a few countries (Germany, France, Switzerland) and would warn you if it knows the city pair to not work.

Germany is dead easy coming from the UK (at least until 2019) because it has more points of immigration than any other country thanks to a pragmatic system where AFIS can assume border police duties. The most pragmatic system is the UK GAR of course, something we should get across Europe but will never get because unlike the UK, most cross border flights happening in Europe do not need immigration/customs processing.

Is this the only way? It doesn’t feel very 21st century…!

The real issue is that the official means for the information to be published is the AIP and since this is published as a PDF it is not machine-readable. If it was published as a database then what you want to do (which is a 100% desirable requirement) would become trivial. You could just do a database query and populate a map with it, etc.

There is a number of people on EuroGA with a keyboard macro which generates “another Peter’s conspiracy theory” but there is another reason for non machine readable publication of aviation data: to protect the “intellectual property” which the various national CAAs believe they hold. Jeppesen got sued for republication of this many years ago (and did a secret settlement in Australia which according to one UK CAA guy was then copied by various European CAAs – I have no idea what it involved) and then there was this outrageous move where the European CAAs blocked the USA from publishing “their property” in a machine readable form to the public (they extremely kindly permitted the USA to continue access to their military…).

Obviously the data already exists in a machine readable form. There isn’t some little guy sitting there typing up each AIP revision, every 28 days on the AIRAC cycle, in Word 2003. This is especially true for airspace, which is wholly in a database and has been since the early days of AutoCAD (35 years ago) but which is also published in the AIPs in a deliberately non machine readable form.

Unfortunately Europe is into money grabbing, except where they cannot do it without breaching ICAO data publishing obligations. So e.g. Germany still charges for the VFR terminal charts…

Germany is dead easy coming from the UK (at least until 2019)

What is changing in 2019? Presumably you mean UK pilots, post Brexit, will need airports with Customs; same as Swiss or Norwegian. I think this is a factor only in Germany or Italy (where one can get Immigration on a PNR, in a lot of places); elsewhere in the world an airport has either both immigration and customs, or neither.