Mandatory electronic flight plan filing at Le Touquet

I know many (most I guess) airlines have IT systems that easily displays regulations, and facilitates re-routing

I don’t think they have more API access than the B2B API, whose FlowServices IMO don’t provide enough information.

Also, the rerouting possibilities are often limited, especially high, where no DCTs are allowed and airways are relatively sparse.

Then there is the “impedance mismatch” between how flight plans are filed versus how airspace is managed. Filed flight plans are basically airway based. Airways are a solution to a problem that no longer exists, thanks to the advent of area navigation. Air traffic management however is sector based. You probably don’t have the flight plan on your strip, just entry and exit points of your sector. Then we have the TFRules, which often try to force certain sectors via forbidden or mandatory airway segments. But these rules increase complexity significantly, it’s often very obscure what they try to achieve. I’ve had tens of these rules changed because I could show that there’s an unwanted side effect. Last but not least you fairly often unexpectedly run into some restriction because the Eurocontrol profiler has a completely different aircraft performance model than your own. This may not be a big issue for CAT, but for GA, it is, especially as there are ICAO aircraft type codes that summarize aircraft with completely different performance characteristics (such as normally aspirated and turbocharged).

So to bring flight planning into the 21st century, I would:

• Get rid of airways. They’re a last century concept that serves no purpose anymore

• Expose (publish) ATC sectors and their handover points

• Change Flight Plan format to only list handover points between sectors. But make the full 4D information explicit, i.e. altitude and time. With the current flight plan format, altitude and time is “guessed” by the profiler, but the profiler necessarily cannot have a detailed accurate performance model for every aircraft out there, so its guess is often far off.

• make the flight plan filing an interactive (between computers) process. Your computer proposes a flight plan, Eurocontrol tells you where you run into congestion and how much delay you can expect, allowing you to make another proposal, taking everything into acount, such as winds aloft, operating costs, etc. until you find the solution that suits your constraints best. And no, this won’t work over AFTN. And yes, this means you cannot flight plan without a computer, but it’s not practical anymore anyway.

This completely different and incompatible world view between AO and ANSP needs to go, it creates endless amounts of confusion and complexity. Computer science has developed the Model View Controller concept in the 70s. It teaches us to use a single data model and defined ways to interact with it and change its state. Having multiple loosely coupled and incompatible data models (the pilot’s flight plan, the air traffic controller’s strip, and the flights representation in the eurocontrol computer) with ad-hoc not well defined ways of interaction is just asking for misunderstandings and troubles.

Get rid of airways. They’re a last century concept that serves no purpose anymore

Look at this….

This is the first step, lower airspace to come with 4D.

Expose (publish) ATC sectors and their handover points

Like this? Chart Border points are already in the AIPs. (Yeah, I know, many countries don´t publish in the AIP, but then…. CHARTS

This is the first step

I know that Eurocontrol pushes FRA, and Eurocontrol really tries to move things forward, but it seems they are dragged back by the ANSP, which seem to resist change, especially the more south you get.

Currently, most of the FRA I know of is night time only, which is of limited use to GA because many of the GA aerodromes are closed during night, and all the FRA I know is at a way higher latitude than I am.

It’s a step, but it’s only at the very beginning.

Like this?

Decidedly not. It needs to be published in an electronically usable way. Just converting dead tree charts to PDFs does not cut it. Eurocontrol does have databases. But unlike the AIP, if you want access to those, you need to negotiate a contract, and this typically takes a quarter of a year. A process that simply does not scale. It seems to me that Eurocontrol would like to make this information more accessible, but they cannot due to ANSP objections.

Furthermore, the data is now so complex that simple paper charts (even if distributed electronically as PDF) are close to useless. An example are the Regional Charts you referenced. Now try to decipher southern england. You don’t stand much chance if you cannot at least enable and disable chart layers at will. So the very minimum to actually understand the data is to have a gis type viewer.

The fact that these charts say they are based on EAD data opens another can of worms. Eurocontrol will stop exporting RAD rules to EAD this fall, because they could never add more than 80% of the rules to EAD, because the other 20% of the rules referenced data that wasn’t available in EAD (such as airspaces). (for me it looked more like 80% of the rules relevant to me were missing). Whenever I contacted the EAD helpdesk about missing airspace definitions, they told me they couldn’t add it because it wasn’t published in the AIP. So the AIPs are incomplete, and so is EAD. Results improved for us a lot when we changed to use ADR, which is the export of Eurocontrol’s internal database. But now we occasionally have the issue that a perfectly valid flight plan, which is accepted and acknowledged by Eurocontrol, then cannot be imported into some ANSPs computer system (for example because they forgot about an intersection they once allocated). But instead of trying to get their database consistent with Eurocontrol’s, these ANSPs rather employ a bunch of people who then manually try to fix up flight plans they cannot get into their system. The practical effect of this is that when you enter the airspace of that ANSP, you get a very long reclearance that has little to do with your original flight plan.

So the data accessibility and quality problems are far from solved, in Europe.