AFIL - airborne IFR flight plan filing

airways wrote:

You just pick up the phone and call the next sector/center.

I don’t understand. In most places in Europe, no one has your VFR flight plan except the destination airport or whatever other unit is responsible for taking overdue action. How is that flight plan accessed and converted to IFR by a phone call to the next sector?

In my experience (my ansp, that is) most VFR flight plans are available in the system, even the ones with a destination beyond my fir. The ones that aren’t probably didn’t file waypoints within the limits of the EBBU FIR. In the old days when computer memory was still a thing these flight plans were binned, but not anymore.

And when one sector has the details, everybody can get the details. In practice we first send an act message to the next sector so they have already some details, then we pick up the phone to ask for an onward clearance and we provide more details when required.

It works very good, when traffic/workload permits…

Some people might read AFIL like this, but SERA clearly states differently.

FWIW, I never thought AFIL would actually work as I described i.e. an “entitlement” – this is obvious to anybody who actually flies IFR in the European system. That idea was suggested by a high profile poster from some years ago who, everyone assumed, had intimate knowledge of the system.

most VFR flight plans are available in the system

It is thus not really any “conversion” from VFR to IFR; rather somebody digs out the VFR FP and uses it to work out the pilot’s intentions, and then knocks up an IFR route approximating it.

I can think of a pile of reasons this will never work in the UK VFR FPs are accessible only in S&R / police / national security scenarios (although AFAIK London Info (FIS) can dig them out, but they can’t do anything useful with them anyway), and IFR FPs are distributed to enroute units only when London Control has not chucked them out as soon as they receive them from IFPS, which they do if they don’t think it is “sufficiently in CAS”.

So, to conclude this for now, AFIL is basically a symbolic thing which doesn’t actually exist…

It’s a “get out of trouble-card”, not an SOP for lazy flightplanning or slot-dodging.

Sure, but I wonder about likely valid scenarios.

Nobody (today, or anytime in the last 12 years since the first “auto router” came out) should go flying without a valid IFPS FP filed.

Hence, all the scenarios I can think of where one is airborne and needs this is where the system screwed up. Like this And I think “the system” has always had a way of dealing with this stuff; they are not going to force a plane to land because they dropped the FP.

The most likely scenario is when your class G VFR bimble encounters IMC/return airport closed and you’d need to continue/divert into CAS.

I’ve used AFIL when “unexpectedly strong headwinds” caused us to have to transition to night VFR before we reached the vicinity of our destination airfield (the ATZ); no problem whatsoever.

airways wrote:

It’s a “get out of trouble-card”, […] the most likely scenario is when your class G VFR bimble encounters IMC/return airport closed and you’d need to continue/divert into CAS. […] not an SOP for lazy flightplanning or slot-dodging.

From here

Airborne_Again wrote:

The reasoning in this judgement really makes no sense.

Might be – but that doesn’t matter!
The pilot wanted to play the system by using some perceived loophole in the rules. He got caught and fined. FAA only used some technical right to do so.

The case is similar to the German case where a pilot got busted for “improper flight preparation” when trying to AFIL an IFR flight plan after he got stuck in IMC on a VMC flight. The backpage of the story was that he actually tried to file an IFR flight plan but was denied due to capacity restrictions on the destination airfield (which have been real as everybody wanted to fly to the field at that day – it was the last day of Tempelhof). Instead of saying “such a pitty but then I can’t fly” he commenced the flight anyways with the clear plan “I will blackmail them to give me the IFR clearance when I’m at a point where I can’t continue VFR/VMC”.
He was called out for that and got fined – in principle totally fine.

What is in my mind a bit unfortunate is the reaction of a very outspoken part of the European Pilot community: Instead of clearly supporting the “He tried to play the system, got caught and therefore has to live with the consequences” there has been a broad discussion on how the authorities could dare to deny this pilot’s human right to air file a flight plan.