Flight suspension is an ATFCM measure. It has nothing to do EU-OPS, PART-NCO,…
If it is still LVO when you get there, you divert,
Not necessarily. Some planes can choose to hold at the IAF for quite some time and ATC cannot force them to divert.
If an aircraft choose to hold because they don’t have the minima :
- Your stack is becoming slowly occupied by planes who will not land at your airport for the next 30 mins because the don’t have the minima.
- You have to open en-route stack to handle other inbound aircraft.
- It becomes more complex for en-route ACC. En-route sector are very likely to be regulated.
- It generates more and more delay for traffic transiting via ACC while aircraft who cannot land hold at the IAF.
As you can see, if many aircraft depart while they will not be able to land, it creates useless delay for inbound traffic who can land and en-route traffic
This is why XCD is used on major airport with a lot of traffic.
You can read the “ATFCM user manual” on eurontrol website if you want to know more info.
Even if you have two alternatives?Yes.
What’s the rationale for this? With two alternatives it’s perfectly legal to fly towards a destination which is below minima in the hope that wx will be better than forecast. Why should Eurocontrol make their own OPS legislation? If it is still LVO when you get there, you divert, and you’re no worse off than if you’ve planned the flight to your first alternative.
You get similar stuff in Germany where DFS change routes around, though AFAIK they don’t summarily delete FPs.
If you have a flight plan in Germany, you can fly. Exceptions must be extremely rare. What can happen is that your flight plan gets suspended (FLS). You would then be informed via email/SMS when using our system. The reason is given as part of the message. This happened a couple of times during the AERO show because they specifically checked all flight plans for a matching slot. It also happens when you miss your departure time window but usually the plan can be activated by ATC in the air. The proper reaction to a missed departure slot is a delay through our interface.
The other thing that can happen is that AIS issue a route change, you also get an email with the new route then. If you don’t receive it in time, it doesn’t matter because you will get it again as part of your clearance, it only might come as a surprise then. Again, this happens very rarely, we have only seen a handful of CHG messages that actually change the route.
The UK OCAS trap is mostly gone because autorouter makes use of the NATS standard route document (SRD) which is a collection of “acceptable” OCAS routings. All such approved routings are visualized with a blue-purple dashed route line. If you see that on your plan for the portions outside airways in the UK, you can be reasonable certain that you’re good. The UK is unlike all other countries, none of these complications are found elsewhere.
how do you get informed that your FP was tossed out and what is the way to solve such a situation?
You don’t get informed.
The first you find out is when the departure tower gives you a departure clearance which is “obviously” not for a high altitude Eurocontrol route.
In general:
If you are departing from a Class G airport, you will be asked to contact the regional FIS (London Information, say 124.60). A non-UK pilot will probably not recognise what has happened. The wording not containing the classical words “cleared to [destination] via flight planned route” might be a clue, but so much European ATC only just hangs in there with English language proficiency that you would probably not think much about this.
If you are departing from a CAS airport, you get what sounds like a departure clearance but after you depart, the next frequency will be some regional FIS or a lower airspace radar unit. This happened to me departing from EGNS (Isle of Man) when I filed “I” for 5000ft which is way too low to be of interest to what was then Manchester Control. The next frequency I got was RAF Valley which was an instant give-away that I got shafted and relegated to Class G for the rest of the flight, but a non-UK pilot would probably just call them up.
UK pilots with the IMC Rating get into this situation from time to time, thinking that an “I” flight plan with an ACK gives them an enroute clearance of some sort.
Yes it’s a bad system but is the result of the politics of money, more recently ATC privatisation, and job protection. The solution is to never file below about FL100 – with certain exceptions which you need to know are OK.
As a more general comment, I think it is dangerous to give the pilot the illusion that a ACK (or MAN) from Eurocontrol means he can just fly somewhere.
In Europe, generally, it does mean that, but not in the UK where there is a second tier in the form of NATS (London Control, Scottish Control) who will throw out the flight plan which they got from Eurocontrol, if it doesn’t mean their criteria, and those criteria are confidential.
For example you can file an IFR route across the UK which busts loads of CAS, at say 2500ft, and you will get an ACK. But NATS will toss it out when they get it from Eurocontrol, so you get airborne and there is no FP in the system (the dep and dest airports only will have a copy). You get similar stuff in Germany where DFS change routes around, though AFAIK they don’t summarily delete FPs.
I have lost count of the sad stories I have heard (sometimes directly on the radio, and those tend to be more desperate) where a pilot thought a flight plan was some kind of clearance to fly, or PPR/PNR notice.
autorouter only tells you “successfully filed” when the plan was accepted by Eurocontrol.
Would it make it more clear to phrase the success message “Plan successfully filed and accepted”? That might remove the confusion by just adding a couple of words.
Not necessarily. I’ve one (1) example with eurofpl where the FPL I filed returned a “MAN” message from IFPS. It was in 2013.
autorouter only tells you “successfully filed” when the plan was accepted by Eurocontrol. If the flight plan goes to the manual correction queue, you will be told so and informed about all status updates (accepted/rejected). Besides the POGO case and some exceptional circumstances (bugs in either Eurocontrol NM or our software), plans never go to the manual queue.
I’ve one (1) example with eurofpl where the FPL I filed returned a “MAN” message from IFPS.
An example for a manual plan would be POGO plans (between two Paris group airports).
provided the suspension is related to weather at the destination airport
Yeah but fog forecasts are notoriously unreliable
Few comments :
I would say virtually every IFR plan that’s “filed” via programs like aurorouter etc. is “accepted”. If it weren’t “accepted”, it wouldn’t be “filed”.
Not necessarily. I’ve one (1) example with eurofpl where the FPL I filed returned a “MAN” message from IFPS. It was in 2013.
Even if you have two alternatives?
Yes.
In fact, this does not make sense (which doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen). The destination weather between ATD and ETA can be very different. Often, in winter mornings, one will depart with the destination totally fogged in (at least if the forecast gives a good chance that the fog will lift. Did that several times with no suspension – heaven forbid – taking place whatsoever.
Flight suspension due to exceptional condition (XCD) is based on aircraft ETA. ETA is calculated by NM (formerly CFMU) with the filed EOBT, taxi time and flight profile.
That means the flight suspension takes flight time into account (provided the suspension is related to weather at the destination airport).
