In the US, there is a distinction between a clearance and a release. Often the clearance is issued pre-taxi at a towered airport by ground control or clearance delivery. The pilot then requests from ground control to taxi to the runway. Finally at the runway and after the run up, the pilots contacts the tower which in turn coordinates with departure control for a release, and once the release is available, the tower issues the takeoff clearance. In the case of a non towered airport, pilot’s frequently request the clearance in the run up area. The clearance ends with wording such as Hold for Release. After the readback of the clearance is acknowledged, the pilot receives release instructions if they are ready or told to stand by for the release. The release typically includes initial heading to use when entering controlled airspace and a void time that the flight must contact ATC after airborne. So at my airport, a typical release would be, Bonanza N7083N released, enter controlled airspace heading 090, time now 1500, void time 1515, contact if not airborne by 1520. ATC in either case is not going to expect an aircraft taking off that where the release has not been coordinated. If the transponder assigned to an aircraft that has not been released shows up on the radar, someone screwed up.
I think that is pretty much the same around the world that there is a distinction between a clearance and a release. The difference between uncontrolled airfields in the US and many uncontrolled IFR airfields in Europe is that there is normally an AFIS person on the ground to speak to who takes care of the release coordination so this happens in the background and one doesn’t normally get the explicit release window times as the AFIS person estimates the airborne time when speaking to the relevant ATC sector. In that sense, it is quite similar to how controlled airfields work where the tower controller actively manages the release coordination with the ATC sector controller. I have had cases where I took too long to get ready for departure and the AFIS person told me that he had to get a new release for me.
The US system is great that there is no requirement for an AFIS person to make the system work and therefore enables IFR departures with clearances from the point of takeoff if the airfield is unmanned. Two weeks ago though I had the relatively frustrating experience at CEC of waiting at the holding point for more than 10 minutes because the inbound arrival did not close their IFR flight plan immediately. Fortunately, at some point someone from the FBO listened on the CTAF frequency and got the pilot to close the IFR flight plan which enabled the Seattle center controller to give me the release.
Autorouter GRAMET page missing from briefing pack
Can anyone reproduce this?
I have just done two routes and both have a blank page 5.
Yes, same for me. It is missing now about nearly one week.
Had it when I flew last week.
They normally answer quickly, if you create a support ticket.
No, I have made two flights last week (Sunday and yesterday), both with normal briefing packs including Gramet.
My Rocket Route subscription expired last month. I thought I’d give Autorouter a try and save a few hundred Euros. Did a few flights with it. The chatbot is fantastic and overall experience was good. Compared to RR I had only two minor UI issues:
- unable to type departure time. Have to use the thing with arrows below. It is two input fields instead of one. In RR one just types 1234 into the time field and that’s it. Even more irritating is that the hour changes as one clicks minutes,
- when browsing the map I couldn’t click on an airfield to quickly bring up it’s plates. Have to go to some briefing section and get AIP separately,
- routing takes ages.
The biggest problem was reliability. I had multiple server side errors on different occasions preventing me from filing a plan or browsing plates. They go away over time, but it is not what I am used to with RR. Yesterday morning I tried to delay a plan with the chatbot. No reply came. On subsequent commands it would reply that it’s busy with previous request. That was it. Decided to go back.
loco wrote:
The biggest problem was reliability.
Strange… I use autorouter from the very beginning, flying 120 to 200 hours per year over all these years and I can count reliability problems on fingers of one hand. However, as I write this the page is completely inaccessible.
routing takes ages.
Routing is sometimes long (depending on route) but the algorithm tries to use all possibilities to get the shortest route. If you let it rely only on airways it’s much faster but the route will most often be longer.
And now it’s back so I guess it was some maintenance of infrastructure problem. But again, I see this more as very rare exception rather than usual behavior.
I agree with Emir. And on the time selection for the flight: you are right, it is not very nice. But I found it not enough of a nuisance to raise to report it to autorouter. Anyway, you should write your input to the their support address, since Achim, the creator, is no longer around here.
