I wonder whether EDFZ is listed as Customs Airport in your directory?
Interesting.
Jeppesen Flitestar says
Public, VFR, Rotating Beacon, Customs, Landing Fee
Jepp Text Pages (the old Bottland Guides) says
(Jepp go to huge length to prevent copy/paste, and OCR works badly also)
This one says
Customs: 2hrs PNR ; Tel: +49 6131 965 0910
Immigration: 1hr PNR ; Tel: +49 6131 3289 8650
all of which is presumably wrong 
The main one people use is ACUKWIK but my sub has expired so I see only basic info which doesn't include Customs.
I did a fuel stop in Serbia but that was a technical landing and I did not leave the transit area. So in fact I did a Schengen/EU to Schengen/EU flight.
Serbia is non EU, there is no such thing as a "tech stop", and Greece does not operate Schengen anyway
In Greece, BTW, handling is mandatory if available - in the AIP somewhere... it's not too much usually.
Achim,
first of all enjoy your trip!
However, Peter is right, your reasoning of Belgrade having been a tech-stop only and that therefore your flight was (customswise/immigrationwise) really a flight from Germany to Greece does not really hold up.I am afraid It does not make a differerence what the purpose of a landing is and whether onr remains in transit area or actually enters the country.
I am afraid It does not make a differerence what the purpose of a landing is and whether onr remains in transit area or actually enters the country.
I am pretty sure you are wrong on this one. If you do a technical stop (that is a term immigration officers do know), then it does not count as a stop from an immigration/customs point of view. In the end I managed to get the Greek immigration officers to understand my itinerary and they confirmed I am to be treated as a Schengen/EU arrival despite my stop in Serbia.
If it was any different, there would a be a huge hassle for all commercial flights that perform fuel stops. OK, there aren't many these days but they still do exist.
PS: During the night I got 15 (!) SMS from Eurocontrol about my onward flight's slot time changing. That is completely crazy, it kept changing back and forth, usually by 3 minutes. Note that there are about 5 aircraft per year in that sector and at my altitude.
Sometimes it helps to know where one is welcome...
Oh, I have only positive things to say about Greece and Greeks. Nice people, I was never treated badly here. Very different from Serbia where I was treated in a very unfriendly and uncooperative way. If only the handling agent in Greece wasn't just called Swissport but also had Swiss efficiency...
If it was any different, there would a be a huge hassle for all commercial flights that perform fuel stops. OK, there aren't many these days but they still do exist.
I definitely do not agree.
I have looked into this many times.
It would be great if it worked, but it can't work that way.
Say you depart UK, land in France at Caen (has Customs), and then land in France at Libourne (non Customs).
That is OK, because it will be assumed (at Libourne) that you "cleared Customs" at Caen. The fact that nobody looked at you at Caen is completely irrelevant; the mere fact that Caen is listed as having "Customs" is all that matters.
In that case the Caen stop works in your favour. You have cleared Customs there.
Let's say you really did what you call a "tech stop" at Caen. How is Libourne going to know you did that? There is no system to record the type of stop you made.
The problem is that you can't have it both ways. You cannot land at the final destination and then choose whether to tell them you did or did not clear Customs at the intermediate stop.
When airliners do a fuel stop without a Customs clearance (I've been on such flights e.g. UK to St Lucia via Barbados) the passengers - those that are not getting off at Barbados - either stay on board, or they disembark into a closed lounge, with guards all around.
I am not aware that this type of arrangement has ever been possible to arrange for light GA. I am sure it is sometimes arranged in the bizjet world where you might be ferrying, ahem, passengers which you do not want anybody to see when you refuel in Scotland, to a certain US base in Cuba 
But then you have the co-operation at the very top to make it all work smoothly.
Greece is quite nervous about traffic going from/to the countries to its immediate north. Macedonia (FYROM) or pre-EU Croatia, or Serbia, for example, improve a Greek policeman's circulation instantly (and trigger the infamous €40 "taxi" charge at Mitilini). Clearly none of these countries are a real military threat to Greece but I think there is a big illegal immigration issue, which Greece suffers from badly because of all those islands which are trivial to reach in a boat, from several bordering countries. Go to Lesbos and see them sleeping in the parks, etc.
PS: During the night I got 15 (!) SMS from Eurocontrol about my onward flight's slot time changing. That is completely crazy, it kept changing back and forth, usually by 3 minutes. Note that there are about 5 aircraft per year in that sector and at my altitude.
I think Eurocontrol hired a really good ex Apollo Lunar Module programmer who does all the arithmetic in 8 bit signed integers, and occasionally gets some underflow or, worse still, overflow, and to play safe and comply with ISO9000, he issues slots whenever the range exceeds -100 to +100. Actually that might be closer to the truth than you might think...
Say Hello to Mr Dimitris at Sitia from me and Justine, and check out the best-in-Greece kataifi at that kiosk outside the Itanos hotel
BTW what does the German AIP say about EDFZ?
I have no wish to create yet another login, and the eAIP link at Eurocontrol seems to do nothing...
All these airport databases are supposedly getting their data from the AIP.
A final data point: Navbox Pro says "Customs O/R".
Peter, I can't find anything in the Eurocontrol eAIP about customs at those airfields like EDFZ. They only publish details regarding "airports" as result of the fact that German DFS holds the copyright and wants to sell the information concerning smaller "airfields" (see former Bottlang Manual - now Jeppesen). But as Mooneydriver reports EDFZ is listed as "customs on request". All this is a big mess and I think it's really good practice to call the airport management in advance to clear the facts i.e. how much lead time they require - same for inbound as for outgoing traffic ? etc
Doesn't the DFS publish even basic details like Customs? That is outrageous.
I knew they didn't publish the VFR terminal charts. But you can get those from Jeppview VFR Europe (or some subset of that, perhaps you just buy Germany). What you should not have to do is pay for Jeppview to get the VFR plates and pay the DFS to see the textual AIP; that would be a completely outrageous ripoff and would help explain why almost nobody reads the AIPs in Europe.
Yes it is a big mess... which is why I agree with you: always contact the airport directly. But a lot of pilots take the view that they should not have to do that, and we get long threads in all the various places on that. You can get away with that in the USA, where they have the AFD book which is normally very accurate (and anyway some 99.9% of US piston GA flights don't involve Customs).
I definitely do not agree.
And I still think you are wrong.
Say you depart UK, land in France at Caen (has Customs), and then land in France at Libourne (non Customs).
It depends on whether you land in transit at Caen or you pass immigration. Once you land, you are not past customs and if you don't pass customs, then you are in transit. How this works with small airports, I don't know because they don't have the physical security of different zones, etc.
When airliners do a fuel stop without a Customs clearance (I've been on such flights e.g. UK to St Lucia via Barbados) the passengers - those that are not getting off at Barbados - either stay on board, or they disembark into a closed lounge, with guards all around.
Yes, exactly, that's how larger airports work that have different zones. They ask what your plans are and put you in the right zone for that. I stayed inside the transit zone in Nis, Serbia, I was well guarded and I was allowed to go to the bathroom which is before immigration. It was a technical landing and I was just in transit, this was fully accepted by the Greek airport after they looked at the data (the RMK/TECHNICAL LANDING).
Imagine an airliner has a technical problem and lands in let's say Russia which requires a visa for everybody. You'd have hundreds of passengers with a real immigration problem. This is what transit zones are for. I know that Frankfurt airport has hotels in the transit zone and there was a case where a guy lived at Europe's worst airport in the transit zone for years (a movie with Tom Hanks).
Interesting question. When 172driver, Jude098 and I had to land at Nantes to do an unplanned tech stop having departed Girona, we cleared out from Shengen customs in Spain. Had we not been forced to stay overnight, they did not want to see us at all. They were going to leave us on the apron and have us depart from there in spite of full time customs.
Strictly speaking they should have cleared us in and back out again but they didn't due to it being a tech stop only.
Strictly speaking they should have cleared us in and back out again but they didn't due to it being a tech stop only.
Did they actually say they were doing that and why?
At Caen for example you land, pay the €4.80 in an airside office, and you fly off. You have now cleared Customs for all of Schengen.
Same possible at La Rochelle (airside hut for payments) although I have not actually done that since I was staying there.
So IMHO this "tech stop" or "non tech stop" business is just wishful thinking, in the minds of the pilots.
