I don’t agree that, at present, you are expected to fly as filed. Actually, I am struggling to think of any IFR flight I have made in the last 20 years which I have flown as filed. I always get progressive directs.
Thus, at present, I don’t give a moment’s thought to the silliness of the plan; I know it will be straightened, unless a military area is active, as was the one to the west of Strasbourg when I went to Friedrichshafen.
It only makes a practical difference to your planning if you are at the limits of your range, and then I file an enroute alternate, just in case. Of the fifty odd times I have filed an enroute alternate over the last thirty years, I have never landed at one.
So, for the moment, I don’t share @Peter’s experience or concerns.
But, I was at an industry consultative meeting the other day at Heathrow where we were told in no uncertain terms that, starting this summer, we will be expected to fly as filed.
I mentioned this to @achimha at Friedrichshafen and he said that he had heard that before and it is political nonsense and will not happen.
The main target of the announcement (actually, everyone in the room except me) was airlines, so it may be that they are more targeting ops departments who are gaming the slot system in busy airspace than we poor souls who just want to make sensible progress through virtually empty airspace.
There is also another consideration, which is the time spent finessing the flight plan (as in Peter’s example above) compared to just pressing “file” and dealing with it in the air. I have reached the conclusion that life is too short to keep trying different routes until one works. The combination of Autorouter and ATC has never let me down.
I was at an industry consultative meeting the other day at Heathrow where we were told in no uncertain terms that, starting this summer, we will be expected to fly as filed.
The presentations by UK airspace regulators are usually depressingly aggressive. At the last NATS one I went to, they should have issued free razor blades. That was the one where the “senior official” said that anyone setting 7600 will be shot down, and he repeated it when I questioned it.
Knowing many US pilots, the majority of light GA routings there seem to be one long DCT.
No, that is only in the vast rural areas. That‘s the same in Scandinavia.
Forget it in US metropolitan areas, which are much more like most of central Europe.
“we will be expected to fly as filed.”
Not the routing, but the filed levels will need to be adhered to, especially above FL195.
airways wrote:
Not the routing, but the filed levels will need to be adhered to, especially above FL195.
That is good news, as it affects most of us in none of of the four dimensions 
Indeed. Piston engines FTW
Timothy wrote:
It only makes a practical difference to your planning if you are at the limits of your range, and then I file an enroute alternate, just in case. Of the fifty odd times I have filed an enroute alternate over the last thirty years, I have never landed at one.
It also matters if you pay airways charges as these are based on GC distance within each FIR of your filed flight plan.
Timothy wrote:
I do pay EC, but I don’t understand why it makes a difference?
Because you pay based on filed not flown route.
I’m with Timothy and am struggling to recollect a time where I didn’t get a more expeditious route than that filed. For sure, I spend time on almost every IFR flight re-jigging the GPS FPL and trying to second-guess the new route, but what else would I do?
