achimha wrote:
That’s this strange German system of ATC deciding when IFR starts and ends.
It’s the same in Croatia (obviously Croatia ATC staff is trained in Germany 
) but I don’t find it strange. Before IFR pick up you’re supposed to remain in VMC flying according VFR – if you’re not able to remain visual you can’t suddenly decide “Oh, I’m going to switch to IFR” and just let know ATC that you switched. When reaching pick up point you’ll confirm with ATC changing the rules (usually they’ll call you). On a positive side if there’s opportunity to get switched before actual pick up point they’ll let you know. When canceling there are two opportunities either a) you cancel it (whenever you want assuming VFR conditions are met) or b) ATClets you know that you reached cancelation point – technically again you cancel it (or ask for rerouting remaining under IFR) and ACT informs you on time of cancelation.
There is IFR/IFR separation in D which means if you think you are IFR but ATC thinks you are VFR, you expect them to separate you from other IFR traffic, they expect you to separate yourself. That’s why they say it on the radio, so that it’s on the tape and you cannot afterwards say “I didn’t know”.
I personally find it clearer and better organized but again I have the German/Swiss mentality that achimha talks about and expect everything to be by the books which it often isn’t.
This business of departing a VFR airfield and having to pick up an IFR clearance is a very dangerous phase of flight.
I can think of several fatal accidents (of IR holders) which happened due to this, though I would argue that this happened because – like most pilots and especially IR pilots – they did not have a topographic map running as a GPS moving map, so they “hacked it” (probably with just a Garmin 430 etc which is useless for that) and got it wrong.
During this phase of flight you are supposed to remain VMC (because you are “VFR”) but in reality that is often impossible, due to low level cloud or because the unit you are initially trying to call for the clearance is shut or at lunch (I’ve had that in France, especially at weekends) so you are working frantically to raise some other nearby unit while keeping outside controlled airspace. Remaining VMC is a long way down the list, but then you have icing conditions to worry about.
Here in the UK there are phone numbers for London Control which can be used. I have not yet used any of them. I have had to wait up to 20 minutes to get a handover from London Info to London Control which is about 19 minutes too long, and works only if the departure is where the CAS base is fairly high e.g. Shoreham and not going north.
achimha wrote:
That’s this strange German system of ATC deciding when IFR starts and ends.
That’s because of the German fear of IFR in class G airspace.
Emir wrote:
It’s the same in Croatia (obviously Croatia ATC staff is trained in Germany ) but I don’t find it strange. Before IFR pick up you’re supposed to remain in VMC flying according VFR – if you’re not able to remain visual you can’t suddenly decide “Oh, I’m going to switch to IFR” and just let know ATC that you switched. When reaching pick up point you’ll confirm with ATC changing the rules (usually they’ll call you). On a positive side if there’s opportunity to get switched before actual pick up point they’ll let you know.
If you can get the clearance on the ground, there is no reason at all for the “IFR starts” business. You could be IFR from the very beginning. There should be no reason to even file Z unless you are unable to climb directly to the minimum safe IFR altitude.
If you have to pick up the clearance in the air, you still could be IFR from the very beginning, but it is slightly trickier as you can’t enter controlled airspace without a clearance. You will need an out in case you are unable to get the clearance in time. Departing VFR doesn’t help unless the airspace is class E – which of course is usually the case in Germany.
When I depart from an airport in class G airspace in Sweden, I don’t even bother with an Z flight plan (expect in exceptional cases) – I file an I flight plan. Incidentally the same goes for destinations. I don’t file Y to a VFR airport when I expect to reach visual conditions before decending through MSA. Doing it this way is explicitly permitted. You can see e.g. in the Autorouter that Sweden publishes all VFR airports as possible departure and arrival points for IFR. (Well, possibly with a few exceptions.)
Airborne_Again wrote:
You can see e.g. in the Autorouter that Sweden publishes all VFR airports as possible departure and arrival points for IFR.
I don’t think this is the case with other countries though. Small airports without IFR procedures are usually not offered for IFR by autorouter.
It depends on the restrictions. DFS publish a VFR only restriction for every single VFR airport. If they miss one, autorouter will show the airport as IFR as we dynamically calculate the status every night. Until we got DFS to correct the data, IFR departures and arrivals from Hahnweide (a small gras strip famous for the vintage aircraft meeting).
So by default every airport can do IFR arrivals and departures unless specifically disabled.
achimha wrote:
So by default every airport can do IFR arrivals and departures unless specifically disabled.
An artefact of that system is that they cannot forbid IFR arrivals/departures to airfields without an ICAO identifier. So you can actually file I plans to/from some german glider strips 
Vladimir wrote:
I don’t think this is the case with other countries though. Small airports without IFR procedures are usually not offered for IFR by autorouter.
Norway, too.
Airborne_Again wrote:
If you can get the clearance on the ground, there is no reason at all for the “IFR starts” business. You could be IFR from the very beginning.
Yes, you can get clearance on the ground but that doesn’t mean you’re IFR from the very beginning of the flight if departure airport doesn’t feature SID. If you takeoff from VFR airport you can only start VFR until IFR pick up point (however it’s defined – be it some intersection, navigational aid or just reaching cleared altitude).
I can’t imagine that you can get clearance on the ground on VFR airport (or any airport that you takeoff VFR) which clears you to start IFR immediately after takeoff. It’s more likely that you’ll get something like “clear visually to x, climb to altitude y, QNH xxxx, squawk yyyy, contact zzzz at xxx.yy”.
