Since the weather was decent for a non-deiced plane today and I needed to do a bunch of approaches before the end of the month for the rolling currency requirement, I decided to go on a little tour — EDLP Paderborn, EDLW Dortmund, EDDK Köln, two approaches at each. I was especially excited about Dortmund because it’s German for “there mouth”, and I like to eat. (I was also excited because it has VOR approaches; not too many of those in Germany.)
To keep the trip time manageable, I decided not to land in Dortmund. I put EDDK as an alternate in the flight plan and my approach requests in the remarks field. Just to make sure, I also called Langen (I think that’s an ANSP in Eurospeak) a few hours before to make sure they were cool with my plan. (They were, and took down my call sign.)
When I showed up in the Dortmund airspace, the controller was a bit surprised that I wanted to keep going after the second approach, and asked if I had a flight plan for that. I said no, but EDDK was my alternate, but she didn’t seem to like that answer very much. She said she’d have to see whether it was possible. After a while, she did indeed send me on my way to EDDK.
So everything turned out well, because like many other controllers this one was very accommodating, even though she had a bunch of traffic at the time. But if I had done something differently it would have gone more smoothly. What would others have done? Filed two flight plans, even though no landing was intended at the first destination? Or filed to EDDK with EDLW as part of the route?
There is a special denomination to be used in flight plans for this purpose – STAY. You file a complete route and put STAY together with time in minutes at places where you wish to perform practice approaches. Activity description goes to remarks where you state: STAY01 – two practice approaches, STAY02 – two practice approaches and so on. During my IFR training we used to file flightplans originating at my vfr airport with destination being the same airport but we typically visited two or three IFR airports putting STAY at each of them.
jmuelmen wrote:
Filed two flight plans, even though no landing was intended at the first destination?
That’s what people do here…
jmuelmen wrote:
Or filed to EDDK with EDLW as part of the route?
That won’t work, IFR (can’t have an airport in the route part)
This is an example of one such a flight:
BULEK/N0140F060 IFR L624 HDO STAY1/0100 DRN Q240 ABKIS Z715 PEROX DCT ABERU STAY2/0030 OKG STAY3/0100 ODPAL1F ODPAL T871 GOLOP P733 ARTUP DCT BULEK VFR LKHK
I always file multiple flightplans. Writing down the outbound clearance when flying the approach is the hardest part :-)
Just to make sure, I also called Langen (I think that’s an ANSP in Eurospeak) a few hours before to make sure they were cool with my plan. (They were, and took down my call sign.)
In fact, it is not a courtesy; it is mandatory for most airfields in Germany to coordinate with ATC beforehand for training approaches (in the UK, you would “book” these training approaches).
the controller was a bit surprised that I wanted to keep going after the second approach, and asked if I had a flight plan for that. I said no, but EDDK was my alternate, but she didn’t seem to like that answer very much. She said she’d have to see whether it was possible.
Indeed, that is playing it dirty. In Europe, it is required to file flightplans for every single leg. Yours was not a genuine diversion, that’s why she didn’t like it.
AFAIK if it’s IFR, you’re supposed to file a plan for each leg. If you don’t intend to land at the end of a particular leg, state your intentions using RMK/. That’s what I would do. If it’s VFR, it should be possible to do it in one plan using just RMK/ (TGL should be touch & go). Don’t know how standardized this is. No messing about with alternates, this is not what they’re for.
Pytlak wrote:
There is a special denomination to be used in flight plans for this purpose – STAY.
I don’t think that’s its purpose. STAY and STAYINFO are used to indicate that you just won’t pass through, but will stick around (sightseeing, that sort of thing).
If e.g. for training here in Holland we fly from EHLE to EHGG, so 1 or 2 approaches, don’t land and then fly back to EHLE we file 2 flightplans. The flight back to EHLE is on a separate flightplan and indeed, we would get our clearance and a new squawk code while established on the approach or just before.
Thanks everyone, that answers that question. I guess I never thought about this situation in the US because in that case the airports were all handled by the same approach control facility.
@boscomantico, interesting, I was wondering about that. For the airports handled by Bremen Radar, it says so in the AIP. For this trip, I only called because I had a hunch that Bremen and Langen have similar ways of doing things.
In the US, we can file flightplans with airports as waypoints. A typical round robin route might have multiple airports in the route. We just add a remark such as REM/Approaches each airport. The airport identifiers must have DCT in front of the identifier. That is one of the few times that DCT is required in a route in the US. So for a flight from my home base of KUZA to nearby airports of KLKR and KEQY and then back home to KUZA, the route field is “DCT KLKR DCT KEQY” and the remark is as indicated above.
