However, if remaining within both Schengen and EU it seems to me that logic would require nothing whatsoever in terms of notifications or contact with government or ATC, if remaining in Class E airspace or lower.
That is true besides the fact that you are required to have a flight plan in most cases. The purpose of a flight plan is to coordinate SAR. If you disappear, they want to know whose obligation it is to search and rescue you. A few countries are able to coordinate without flightplan, Germany/Austria and Germany/Czech Republic are the ones I know of.
Completely unrelated, yes – flight plans need to be filed when crossing borders, but this is more an ATC-related issue, isn’t it?
SAR, not ATC. ATC do not not even know about your flightplan. If you open it via ATC/FIS, they will call AIS to do it. ATC only know about IFR flightplans or others that trigger ATC involvement.
It would be really great for European GA (certainly for my enjoyment anyway ) if one could fly across the Schengen zone under those conditions, as in the US – where US states arguably have more overall legal and financial autonomy than European countries in 2014.
That analogy doesn’t work. The USA are a single country and the individual states are more comparable to the Swiss cantons and German Bundesländer than the EU. If you’re making analogies, don’t forget US/Canada which are in a very close relationship and yet trying to fly with your GA airplane from Canada to the US is a rather involved administrative task.
Creating a flightplan is 5 minutes of effort and then I can fly from Estonia to Portugal. I don’t know why people consider this to be a problem. It’s free and it’s easy.
I haven’t filed a flight plan since 2004. For me, flying is about planning the flight and doing it independently so I also rarely communicate with en route ATC, including on long-ish, high-ish trips, and prefer it that way. If it were otherwise, I wouldn’t fly. To each his own, no question, but I’m pretty certain GA would be far healthier and more widespread in Europe if the same option existed there. Relatively few people choose to fly cross country ‘in the system’ in the US, as you doubtless will understand. If they did, there is no way ATC could handle the volume.
Based on my understanding of Schengen, the EU, and ICAO airspace recommendations its not clear to me what “doesn’t work” about allowing aircraft to fly VFR anywhere they want in the Schengen + EU zone without flight plans, ATC or other interference. The SAR thing sounds like trivia to me. The best rational explanation seems to be that the airspace is so screwed up that its impractical… But that doesn’t affect the basic principle.
In terms of aviation regulation the US states are clearly more united than European countries, that is certainly true, but from the broader perspective of states rights over central government, I think in 2014 the US states actually have more autonomy, by Constitutional design. Opinions differ on that, and the European situation is still very much in flux. That’s why I used the term ‘arguably’ even though I have no intent to actually argue about it 
Canada, Mexico and the US have three entirely separate systems of government, sharing no common institutions and connected only by treaties. Its not quite the same (dare I say thank God) as the relationship between US states or EU countries!
PS Please consider this my contribution towards non-IFR European GA discussion 
Sure the world is stuck deep in political baggage.
But we have what we have…
But also any sovereign country with a military machine will want to believe that it is secure from an airborne attack (which is normally the first thing if hostilities break out). So they all operate a surveillance system. Obviously in peacetime this will be leaky as hell (are they really tracking everybody going to Le Touquet, some with missing flight plans) but they will still be operating it. And flight plans are an important part of creating a “known traffic” environment, where unusual movements are more visible. The UK runs such a system – IBM used to advertise the specially developed software package which monitors the traffic, etc.
Same goes for smuggling, I am sure, and in today’s climate where Europe is supposed to be filling up with Romanian refugees is one where rolling anything back is seen like putting a convicted perv in charge of a nursery.
I don’t think flight plans are the biggest fish to fry by a very long way. The worst things are
Most of the above are not “national political” items. They are localised gravy train / job creation / economic items.
Also Europe positively loves gravy trains – look at Brussels
Peter, that makes sense – I think you pinpoint the actual driver with the national defense issues.
I do think if there was freedom for Schengen zone + EU VFR GA to go where it wants minus flight plans or ATC contact, then about 2/3 of the problematic issues of your list would go away due to higher volume. Many of those items are the results of ultra low traveling-GA volume. The massively different ATC policies obviously are a separate issue that also discourages international GA.
Flight plans or ATC contact are really really low on the EURO GA hassle list. Even VFR flying across Europe requires minimal ATC contact, and most of it is actually quite useful in congested airspace where Info frequencies give radar traffic advisories although not required to. Flight plans are a non-event and they don’t “go in the system” save for a telex to the departing and arriving airfield, plus the SAR database.
Having received a phonecall from SAR who were worried about my whereabouts as I forgot to close my flight plan on an alpine VFR flight, I can testify the system works as advertised and I’m all in favor of that. If I crash I’d rather they start looking ASAP.
As for GA border crossing hassles – i recommend dealing with eAPIS and the convoluted DVFR flight plan procedure, confirmation call with the immigration officer, 15min ETA precision et al before criticising the European system ^^
There are a million reasons GA activity is low but I think flight plans and other political aspects are the smallest part of it. I do not know of anybody who would use GA for transport inside Germany but not for crossing the border. Either they do neither of the two or both. ATC integration in Europe is rather good.
I hardly ever use GA for transport because (living in a metropolitan are) there are better means in 95% of the cases. That might be different if I lived somewhere in the US outside the large cities. If you look at which companies operate their own aircraft, you will find that it’s mostly those that are based in rural areas. If you ask me what would have to be different for me to use GA more for business, I wouldn’t know what to say. Thinking practically (which I believe I do in business), I can’t imagine and don’t really want to use GA. Public transport is the better solution and this is where Europe is much ahead of the US (ever heard of Caltrain?).
I am very glad that Europe is diverse and I do not want to live in a uniform Europe. This means that Italian ATC is Italian and the Brits are British (driving on the left lane and doing standard overhead joins). The positive aspects of diversity greatly outweigh the practicality disadvantages.
Concur. Living in Switzerland, a car is more a liability than anything else.
I think the reasons I listed are the main obstacles to GA being used seriously. Plus
The USA solves most of these issues, with FAA controlled (taxpayer generated) funding playing a critical part.
The difficult Customs interface between USA and outside-USA is probably comparable to a European flying into Africa. Suddenly you are into stuff like overflight permits and “local sponsorship invitations” which – in practice – need to be purchased from an agent, for c. €100/person depending on what exactly is needed, and he in turn lubricates the machinery of the usually utterly in-your-face corrupt regime.
I am sure American businessmen who bizjet regularly to Canada, Mexico, etc, use similar commercial services who sort it all out. Even in Europe, you can buy a routepack, with the Eurocontrol routes and a wx briefing, for something like €40 per leg, and the jet operators use those (it seems that most can’t work out the Eurocontrol routings like we do). At the higher level in the food chain, this is the sort of thing that Jeppesen do, for a few hundred $/month and upwards. They don’t just publish approach plates. They can even take care of really essential stuff like “refuelling stops without excessive Customs attention” for flights between Iraq and Cuba – try sorting that through your usual Bongo Bongo Land overflight agent
I am sure American businessmen who bizjet regularly to Canada, Mexico, etc, use similar commercial services who sort it all out.
Peter, most of the traffic I see is private, families etc. it’s amazing to me the number of Mexicans who commute back and forth by plane. The Americans doing the same are mostly doing recreational trips. I’ve ridden along once. In total there’s maybe one flight back across the border every 15 minutes at the local POE, which has full time customs and no commercial traffic.
It’s not that complicated but consistent with my thoughts on traveling by GA in the EU, if every long interstate flight in the US involved the same planning and administrative hassles, GA would collapse. I think it takes a quite unusual kind of individual to do that for fun.
