boscomantico wrote:
If the AIP (VFR) doesn’t mention “customs”, you can’t land there coming from outside the EU. You can’t just land there and say “well, I don’t have anything to delcare anyway, hence I don’t Need customs”. German customs simply don’t reach out to those airfields, but they would have to, in order to be able to make spot checks.
However, you are allowed to depart from such airports if you have nothing to declare and your aircraft is registered in the EU. A special provision of the German customs code that very few pilots know about.
While most pilots choose a specific destination to fly to, and then check it in the AIP, it’s a pity that countries don’t publish a table of their airports, with a tick next to the various facilities for each one.
I am sure many companies have compiled these in-house, but it should not be necessary. Also the country is best placed to keep it up to date. Everybody else has only one option: scan every AIP cycle for every airport and see what has changed…
Maybe I’m missing something but I fail to see:
a) why this thread is sticky, what its importance is
b) where this thread brings map of customs airfields in Europe
It was made sticky in the hope of getting contributions around Europe, but unfortunately we have this
It is quite a time consuming thing to do however, with the stuff in the AIPs and nobody AFAIK having collated the info into a database. It is complicated with many German and Italian airports having Immigration and not Customs, etc, etc.
The original driver behind this – the post-2012 situation in France – is relatively easier because almost all French airports have either C+I or neither (the default position around the world actually) and indeed we have a sort-of map for France. Two actually. But even for France nobody wants to do the maintenance.
It’s just like the old debates about having an airport database… all the previous attempts at this have failed. There is one in Germany but virtually all the contributions are from a group of German pilots who travel, so much of it is way out of date.
I also think that most pilots plan a trip somewhere, choose one or a few airports, and check their AIP. After all, you have to check the AIP anyway, so you may as well do that at the start. What you won’t get from the AIP is stuff like facilities, fuel price, etc, but those change all the time anyway, and subjective stuff like “is the airport GA friendly” is massively dependent on the pilot’s attitude to paying for stuff, or possibly which member of the handling crew you happen to get. For example I think Dubrovnik is fantastic at €50 but many will say it is too much and will never go there…
I will un-sticky it.
Just to say I found this map format very helpful, as it sped up searching for the first airfield to land at in France (previously spent a lot of time either comparing the AIP to a map, or a map to the VAC)
You need to check the AIPs though because I don’t think anybody is updating these mapping projects.
