IFR departure from private airstrip UK

The last time I did it, we entered XXXX then put the Lat and Long in item 18

Can’t you enter ZZZZ and enter the name of your departure strip in 18 preceded by /DEP ??? If the airport isn’t listed / doesn’t have a name / is just a field, use it’s coordinates after /DEP instead….

If the airfield is private, you can’t depart IFR. Unless the private owner paid for all the IFR approach/departure surveys and development, and that seems pretty unlikely. So you have to depart or arrive VFR, and switch to IFR once you’re in the air. Which implies a Y or Z flight plan and a point where you intend to transition from VFR to IFR or vice versa. I have not played around much with IFR routing programs but I can well imagine that they are limited to official IFR routes, approaches and departures, and will simply ignore VFR portions of your plan.

Furthermore, as stated, simply put in ZZZZ as the departure or destination airfield, and use the DEP/ or DEST/ identifier in the Remarks to identify the airstrip. I found it’s best to put in both the name of the strip and the lat/long coordinates. I recently did such a trip to a relatively well-known public strip in the Netherlands which happens not to have an ICAO designator. I only put in the name of the field in the DEST/ remark, the flight plan came back refused and I had to look up the coordinates of the airfield, add that and resubmit.

The lady from the FIO was very helpful but when I asked her why they did not simply have a list of well-known non-ICAO airports and their coordinates to hand (it’s only a handful of airports in NL after all), she said that they had had that list once, but apparently it became lost.

If the airfield is private, you can’t depart IFR.

In the UK, you can. It might not be a good idea to depart in IMC, but there is absolutely nothing to stop you being IFR. As far as I know, the UK is the only place in Europe where this is possible.

Good tip on adding lat/long!

If the airfield is private, you can’t depart IFR. Unless the private owner paid for all the IFR approach/departure surveys and development, and that seems pretty unlikely. So you have to depart or arrive VFR, and switch to IFR once you’re in the air.

Don’t know where you got that from. An airfield does not need an IFR departure procedure to be able to depart in accordance with the instrument flight rules.

The point is academic though. One can just depart and nobody will ask whether you were departing IFR or VFR.

Flightplans are a different aspect though. UK filing rules allow filing India from any airfield. In several other European countries, this is not the case and the ANSPs force you to depart on a Zulu plan.

In the US, one can file an IFR or VFR flightplan from or to a private airport that does not have an ICAO identifier. We have two types of flightplan formats. Most US GA pilots use the domestic format, which directly accepts a non ICAO identifier for the departure airport, destination airport, or alternate. It also accepts a latitude and longitude or VOR radial distance format. If there are no published approaches for the destination, then an alternate must be specified that has a suitable approach.

We can also use the ICAO format, but this is not used very often unless the flight is international, or RVSM airspace usage is required, or RNAV 1 SIDs or STARs are desired. The US ANSP accepts ZZZZ in any of the airport identifier locations (Departure, Destination, Alternate 1 or 2) with the appropriate information in field 18 after DEP/, DEST/, ALT1 or ALT2. It may be any of the valid formats including a non ICAO airport identifier (which we have thousands of), a latitude and longitude, or a VOR radial distance format.

I’m playing around with the Autorouter but it requires an ICAO identifier.

Actually it doesn’t. However, it requires the airstrip to be in its database. We use the Jeppesen names, e.g. EG41 for Fishburn. In case your strip is not in the database, please open a support ticket and request adding it (provide all detail you can please). We’re planning to let users enter non ICAO airfields directly but for now this is how it has to be done.

Well, I appreciate the situation in the UK is different, where “IFR” is more a state-of-mind thing than something very formal. So you can do things under IFR in VMC which you cannot do in IMC. (For now – when the new EASA rules (SERA?) take effect this will change, probably.)

But I can’t see how a route finder can validate an IFR route from or to an airfield that’s not connected to an IFR airway intersection via a SID or STAR. I mean, the whole point of programs like Autorouter is to find the shortest legal route. So each segment needs to validate somehow. Or is Autorouter treating that like some sort of “DCT” or “RAVEC” segment, and allows it up to a certain number of nautical miles?

On a related note: Are you really going to depart from a private strip, without properly surveyed and published IFR departures and approaches, in actual (hard) IMC? Or are you planning to depart under IFR but in VMC, to avoid having to make a VFR/IFR transition later in the flight?

In UK Class G, or for any airport anywhere for which IFR is not blocked by Eurocontrol, and for which no SID/STAR is published, you join the airport to the airway route with a DCT.

Eurocontrol doesn’t seem to care about the DCT, so long as it is shorter than the MAXDCT for that airspace.

In the UK, MAXDCT is something like 100nm (below FL100) or so, so this works. In another country (and I recall Albania as one example) where you might have MAXDCT=0, an airport is inaccessible for IFR unless SIDs/STARs are published.

The UK Class G thingy of “IFR being just in your brain” will apply equally anywhere where IFR is allowed in Class G – unless the country does some kind of separate thing and e.g. mandates radio contact for any IFR.