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AFIL - airborne IFR flight plan filing

What you are portraying is the (highly unusual) UK situation.

In all other countries, pilots don’t file “directly”; the send the flightplan to the responsible AIS office and they take care of the addressing.

Even if he wanted, a pilot outside the UK wouldn’t be able to to the final addressing of his flightplan, since he doesn’t have a way of addressing AFTN addresses (I know, if using say Rocketroute or Skydemon, technically one dould do it, using “manual address addition” feature, but it would be against the rules.

Please don’t do the final (full) addressing of VFR flightplans if you are departing outside of the UK!

Mainz (EDFZ) & Egelsbach (EDFE), Germany

I don’t recall the details but it isn’t just the UK – in the sense of both the way VFR FPs need to be addressed, and in the availability of taxpayer funded AIS.

For example look at this Notam from LFAT

There is still Olivia but it is widely believed that will be shut down at some stage. It costs a load of money because it is a human-staffed office with a web front end. They also generally refuse to process FPs with both ends (and sometimes even just one end) outside France, which makes it usable only for those who never leave France. OK; that’s the big majority, but nobody wants to use two methods, and have to remember how each one works. Also, within France, you don’t normally need FPs for VFR.

Also the UK does offer FP filing, via a NATS office. They don’t like to publicise it, but they have to (for foreign pilots, too). They even accept faxed FPs FP processing is an ICAO obligation…

Skydemon uses EuroFPL for FP filing. It is EuroFPL that have to do all the dirty work.

If I wanted a free facility for VFR FP filing I would use EuroFPL. They offer 10 free per month, after which it doesn’t cost much.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Sorry, but you don’t fully understand how this works. That NOTAM merely says what it says. They still want you to transmit FPLs to the departure ARO only (Lille in this case). Just because one uses internet to file, doesn’t mean that the pilot does the full (final addressing). Internet portals like Olivia, DFS-AIS, etc. are nothing more than a data entry mask that pre-formats and sends an e-mail to the AIS office.

Last Edited by boscomantico at 16 Aug 08:34
Mainz (EDFZ) & Egelsbach (EDFE), Germany

Each country publishes in ENR 1.11 how flight plans should be addressed. That’s the gold standard and that’s what services like autorouter (currently for Z/Y only), EuroFPL and Rocketroute rely upon.

The indirect addressing via AIS will hopefully disappear in the near future. It’s a superfluous service in the internet age, costing money and adding negative value because it tells people they can be sloppy about flight plans, there is always somebody doing the work for them.

RR/EuroFPL doesn’t rely on that! They have some rules, but these are not updated properly.

United Kingdom

There are providers of VFR flightplan services that do try to address correctly.
See: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-vK592zR06f5kvDqdFI9mNMx1q_1_lV7

EDLE, Netherlands

Has anyone tried AFIL in recent years?

It is hard to imagine that it actually works. The routing picture in Europe is getting harder, not easier.

At the same time, we have generally easier electronic FP filing options so there may not have been many attempts to test it.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Peter wrote:

Has anyone tried AFIL in recent years?

I do it about 2 times a year. But probably not the way you are thinking about that.

If you fly across Germany VFR on Top of a 100-200ft bkn Layer even with the best preparation it might happen that coming closer to your destination you find that the bkn locally is more on the 7/8 than on the 5/8 side and therefore there is no “hole on duty” that allows you to get back to earth in VMC.

A-filing an IFR-Plan for cloudbreaking (mostly as complex a “via DCT FIX”) is often the better option than flying a 100NM detour to a region where you know clouds are better.

I’ve never been denied such an afil – but I also never had the attitude “I have the constitutional right to afil..” but always “would be great if you could grant me the favor that I can avoid an hour detour…”

BTW.: Is it some higher wisdom that my spellchecker in the browser always wants to change afil to fail ???

Germany

Malibuflyer wrote:

I’ve never been denied such an afil – but I also never had the attitude “I have the constitutional right to afil..” but always “would be great if you could grant me the favor that I can avoid an hour detour…”

According to SERA you have a right to AFIL, but in practise ATC will be too busy to accept one. But I suppose you filed with Langen info? That’s an advantage of having separate info frequencies.

ESKC (Uppsala/Sundbro), Sweden

Airborne_Again wrote:

According to SERA you have a right to AFIL,

One needs to be specific on what “have the right” really means. Yes, an afil is possible according to SERA. But that doesn’t imply that ATC at any given point in time from any position has to do everything to actually do that. It also doesn’t say, that ATC at any point in time needs to have the capacity to plan the route with/for you (as only very few pilots have a “Pre-checked IFPS-validated” routing from their current position on hand).

One thing one must also not forget: For afiled flight plans IFPS does not do any route validation as it is the responsibility of the ATC unit to validate it (like if they give you a clearance in flight that doesn’t match your flight plan). Therefore any afil that is going beyond the sector of the ATC unit where you file it is a significant coordination effort for ATC.

And I’m not yet talking about those few (but existing) fellow pilots that say “I got a slot I don’t like for my Z-Plan so why not start VFR without plan and then execute my right to AFIL”.

So yes: You have the right to do so but in a sense that it is possible and not in a sense that you are guaranteed to get it at any time.

Airborne_Again wrote:

But I suppose you filed with Langen info?

Typically with Langen or Bremen Radar as I do such flights mostly above FL100 which is Charlie in Germany. And especially since march Radar does actually sound happy if they can do something for you – even if complexity of finding the route and synchronizing with adjacent sectors does not seem to be such a huge challenge in times where you get a 300NM “Cleard to destination via direct” across Germany.

Germany
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