This Friday I was told at EDVK Kassel that there is a new rule in place. For flights to France and Belgium one is supposed to order immigration/customs 4 hours in advance.
I was unable to find the NOTAM about that. I’ve checked autorouter’s briefing facility with airport and FIR codes for France and I can can only find NOTAMs that are meant for airlines and their passengers.
Might it be that the person at the Kassel GAT confused two things or is there a NOTAM out that requires GA to comply with the same?
Did they tell you this is a rule from Germany, or from the two destination countries?
IMHO this terrorist stuff is not going to go away, we will see loads more bombings, especially in Belgium where it seems easy to do them, so Schengen is likely to be dead and buried for a while.
I checked the Belgian NOTAM’s but found nothing, neither generally nor specifically for certain aerodromes.
@Peter: please avoid lowly and easy slurs, my authorities have perhaps not been perfect but the London and Madrid subway bombings were not much more difficult, were they? This was supposed to be a quality forum, remember?
Then again, Schengen will indeed suffer, at least in the facts and probably even in the spirit, for a long while.
We should all stay calm and keep our cool. That’s as far as I’m willing to comment on that subject here. Our topic is a different one :-)
But on the other hand that stuff is affecting GA touring and business travel. For the time being I’m simply overflying France but during summer I would love to land and lunch or even have dinner and stay overnight instead of going 4 hours in one go. But I don’t intent to call immigration/customs for just that.
After landing at Béziers on Thursday (coming from inside France), the lady in the handling container told us that “customs” was now to be requested as well for intra-Schengen flights so that the police could check passports. I asked if it was a problem that we had arrived from another French aerodrome without PPR, as that was “intra-Schengen” as well, but she didn’t find it funny.
It did make me wonder if there is some unpublished law requiring us to do this now, because there was nothing in the NOTAMs to that effect. I think if they made some law under the state of emergency rules, we would still have to follow it even if there is no realistic way to know about it. That is also why Europe is a farce – there are these great principles about free movement of people and goods etc., and then every local commune, region, province or country can just ignore that and make their own laws, and you’d have to read through all of their legal publications in order to know about it.
On the flight back, there was a pilot flying Colmar-Habsheim on the frequency of Bâle Info who wanted to close his flight plan. You could hear the controller’s jaw drop as he asked for confirmation: “You are on a flight plan on this flight?” – Pilot: “Yes, since it’s now mandatory for all flights from Colmar”. Well, actually I thought this applied only to flights to Colmar, but why not make it even more silly.
Crazy times. But I will spare you with my personal views to the underlying problem in the interest of keeping politics out of here.
wonder if there is some unpublished law requiring us to do this now
Yes, Stephan’s opening question made me wonder the same. But I heard nothing in the news broadcast about the Schengen regulations being suspended for Belgium, or for any other country.
I will spare you with my personal views to the underlying problem in the interest of keeping politics out of here.
Thanks, and I’ll gladly join. If only our moderators would, too.
Let me change “easy” in my previous post to “easier”.
Perhaps what gets reported differs between countries?
It seems to be a situation where we have to comply with something without being informed the official (NOTAM) way but by random chat with airport personal. I would guess that you get passed on the information only at slightly larger airports but not at the regular club type airfields.
I only got the information because the lady at the GAT knows that I fly frequently across Europe. I’m pretty sure she doesn’t tell that to everybody who flies locally or to people she doesn’t know anything about their travel patterns.
We flew from Mannheim to Montpellir last Thursday without any problem. Neither in EDFM nor in LFMT did we have to clear any kind of customs or show any documents. We continued to Perpignan yesterday, VFR, no flight plan, and only needed to present our licenses in Montpellier to get air side.
It seems to be a situation where we have to comply with something without being informed the official (NOTAM) way but by random chat
In December 2015 I experienced almost the same in EDFZ. They were asking for 2 hours prior notice for flights to France according to a directive of the border police (Bundespolizei). I complained that no NOTAM concerning this was published. One day later there was an e-circular by EDFZ cancelling this demand.
I think the regional border police administration started this practice without following the rules of international air traffic … namely to publish notams to acceptably inform all participants.
Don’t know how they handle it by now after the Brussels attacks.
