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Spain, Sabadell LELL: "We don't have all the details for your flight plan"

This might be interesting for some including @achimha

It’s not really news but I thought I should tell about it and maybe someone has an explanation or can even change that little detail.

Almost every time I depart from Sabadell LELL near Barcelona I get asked for persons on board, color of the aircraft, endurance and for the ELT – the SAR details. Every time I have filed my IFR flight plan via autorouter and every time the OPS people at Sabadell tell me they don’t have received that information and need it as the flight plan were not valid without. Every time I tell them that the information has been filed and is available to the right people and tell them the details on the phone so that we all can happily carry on.

My assumption is that Eurocontrol distributes the relevant portions of the flight plan to ATC but strips out the – at the time – not relevant bits for search and rescue. I further assume that the OPS people at Sabadell are used to sending out plans but not receiving them and thus don’t really know what they are supposed to do in a case where they are receivers of flight plans that originate at their airfield. They assume a mistake and ask the pilot for the missing details. Maybe they even send the flight plan out once again on their own.

Frequent travels around Europe

Item 19 of a flight plan contains SAR details. This part is not disseminated to ATC stations per ICAO standards. It has never been different and is the same everywhere. If a station is interested in item 19, it has to send a RQP message to Eurocontrol (or to us). Spanish ATC are responsible for 80% of all RQP messages we receive and process and unfortunately 80% of the Spanish RQP messages are malformed and require manual processing. All in all, very poor understanding of the flight plan process by Spanish participants…

Thank you. I may point them to RQP – with a smile :-)

Last Edited by Stephan_Schwab at 29 Jun 07:39
Frequent travels around Europe
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