ch.ess wrote:
Who has called a customs office recently and experienced that – personally
I experienced the functional equivalent of that, in France:
lionel wrote:
Some people are due to say “phoning customs at the number in the AIP”. I must say that I tried that, multiple times (customs and immigration), and nothing ever came out of it. The person on the phone just doesn’t get what I want. They say stuff like “the airline will arrange the presence of customs checks, you don’t have to” or “there are no direct flights between the airports you mention”. When I insist that I’m the PIC and I will do that direct flight, after some time, they bail out by giving me a different number (e.g. the customs office of the neighbouring bigger commercial airport where I’m not flying to) and/or an email address (e.g. “here’s the email for my whole team, I haven’t got a clue what I should do about you, but someone else on the team will ready your email and will know”). The email usually doesn’t give any answer or acknowledgement, and the customs office of the bigger airport definitely has more clue, but it is not their remit; they do checks at that airport, not the one I’m flying to.
With “local help” I meant a local pilot, who REALLY knows the procedure with the customs notification.
The Flugleiter is not thus. As I said, these guys are often totally clueless as to flying regulations relevant for pilots. They often are no pilots, and some of them do it in their free time, as a club duty.
Bottom line, once again coming back to the Würzburg case, but also generalising, for Germany: if your flight requires customs, and customs are PPR, and you call the airfield manager or Flugleiter, and he merely says “all is good, no problem”, (without even asking you the details of your flight in order to pass them on to customs) be VERY WARY and don’t just go. Make sure CUSTOMS have been involved/notified.
In France, this is fairly clear. They use Douannes for customs, and Police for immigration. Either can be PNR, as noted in the AIP.
The German situation is much more complex because of the different “grades” of customs airports.
But maybe the potential for a non EU inbound flight to get caught is similar, if the PNR communication didn’t arrive (and French authorities usually do not respond to comms). Time will tell…
The simple solution is to fly out-of-EU flights only to those EU airports which are definitely known to be non-PNR/PPR or to get a positive ack from the Customs office.
my personal way of dealing with customs is almost always doing at relatively bigger airports where customs is not a matter of arrangement but is always offered during operating hours. There are many big airports with very little traffic. When I am travelling, I just try to minimize all effort required to pre-arrange things like customs which would just add additional timing stress.
Hearing all this happen, would you all still trust the officer’s feedback even from the customs office? I’d probably request that feedback in written which is again additional stuff to deal with.. just go to a nice big low traffic airport and rather worry more about if they have a working coffee machine there than whether if you did everything right with customs. Landing at bigger airports with permanent customs services is just too easy in Germany. Many of them have barely any traffic neither and too cheap for the service you get.
boscomantico wrote:
Fortunately, many of these airports not not too expensive (despite being “big”) and are accomodating to light VFR or IFR
I concur, when in doubt use the A list. The biggest airport I ever landed at was Leipzig EDDP, we paid all of 42€ for landing and handling, that and fuel paid right there on the parking with a Regular VISA credit card. Ready to continue our journey. Getting customs and/or immigration would have been trivial. Same maneuver in Nürnberg EDDN was 35€.
These prices beat the hassle and uncertainty any day.
Frans wrote:
Even if you’re coming from another EU-country, always expect a random check by German customs, especially if you’re coming from a country where customs may expect smuggled goods (drugs, cash, cigarettes etc.). At my homebase, customs officers showed up several times to check airplanes coming from the Netherlands.
Intra-EU, random customs checks are illegal. Customs must always have some kind of suspicion to make an intra-EU check. Of course, it can be quite weak.
Airborne_Again wrote:
Intra-EU, random customs checks are illegal. Customs must always have some kind of suspicion to make an intra-EU check. Of course, it can be quite weak.So far as I know, thats (unfortunately) not true. Customs may check whenever they want (this is something different than police law), without having a suspicion. On the Dutch-German border, German customs do random checks quite often, especially checking young people on drugs. But also 30 km behind the border with Luxembourg (near Bitburg), I once had the question “do you have more than 10.000 euros cash with you?”.
Frans wrote:
So far as I know, thats (unfortunately) not true. Customs may check whenever they want (this is something different than police law), without having a suspicion.
Things may have changed. This was discussed in Swedish media when Sweden entered the EU so I’m quite sure it was true at the time.
Any “no random searches allowed” reg is trivial to solve. The UK police just stop you and say “Sir, you were swerving” 
Peter wrote:
Any “no random searches allowed” reg is trivial to solve. The UK police just stop you and say “Sir, you were swerving”
That’s basically what Swedish customs said at the time. But it is slightly more difficult to motivate if they come out to an airport specifically to check on a particular aircraft.
