Germany AIP and GAR
Good morning all,
Whilst I’m struggling to find the German AIP, does anyone have any information on Gar/gendec reporting requirements for a trip into Germany?
The Germany AIP is available online through the EAD, but it misses important information pertaining to VFR flights. For access to the VFR subset, called the AIP VFR, users have to pay.
The term GAR is a UK-only term, not known anywhere else in the world.
Germany also doesn‘t make any use of Gendecs.
In fact, there is no paperwork at all involved with flying into Germany from say the UK. Your only obligation is to USE an airport/airfield which is designated a border crossing point. Consult the AIP/AIP VFR, and check (in the AD section) whether the airfield in question has „customs“ and whether there is any PN requirement going along with that. That‘s all you have to do.
I am sure this has come up before but while Germany doesn’t publish for free the VFR approach charts etc, is there any official reference for which airports have customs and/or immigration, what opening hours, contact details, etc?
If this info is not online but exists “somewhere”, it would be quite a useful thing to put in our forthcoming airport database. It obviously cannot be copyright, in the way graphical “creations” like charts can be.
is there any official reference for which airports have customs and/or immigration, what opening hours, contact details, etc?
The German AIP VFR.
boscomantico wrote:
For access to the VFR subset, called the AIP VFR, users have to pay.
Call the AIS Center at the number published on AIS-Portal page of the DFS website. They will email you the pages you require, with an admonition not to redistribute it. Insist you need charts and text pages, if any. Call again if you didn’t get both. Some aerodromes have their own text pages, others are “only” in the “List of Aerodromes” at the beginning of section AD 2. Ask for the pages “Notes on the Following List of Aerodromes”, and the page(s) where your aerodrome(s) of interest is/are.
True, but doesn‘t help in the context of the question posted by Peter, as that would require the full list (dozens of pages) and also an „update service“ to keep the database in shape.
Which, however, is going to be difficult, because the info reported in the AIPs in incomplete in this regard. There are many airfields in Germany which have the „customs: nil“ entry, but where immigration/passport check“ IS possible (which is the interesting bit for flyers coming from or going to the UK)
Bosco – check your PMs.
In a related topic, I wonder if this old site is reliable and, if so, where do they get the data from? This is one sample:
I have used it for many years but, like the Jepp “text pages” it was generally out of date garbage – except for airport contact numbers (phone and fax 
) and email addresses which can then be used to get the real info.
Can anyone suggest a German airport for which nothing exists in the free AIP but which has customs/immigration? I can then check a couple of potential sources.
One could probably dig up airport websites with google (that seems to be the way things are going nowadays, which is quite wrong) and get info from there. It has been reported that the LBA have sued airports which put the VAC charts on their websites (because it deprives the LBA of €€€) but surely the textual info cannot be copyright.
Anyway, the intention in the EuroGA airport database is to have a field for AIP URLs and one could drop any airport website URLs in there. It is daft to script/scrape info (which is deliberately published in non machine readable form to protect the national CAA revenues) and republish it, perhaps with errors. The QA issues are formidable. For example what do you do if you have a PIREP saying customs=yes and the AIP saying customs=no but you know for a fact that the AIP is wrong. No flight planning software publisher ever solved this, and IMHO there is no solution.
I just browsed the German AIP and AIP VFR for a while and it is a complete mess. The aerodromes which appear in the AIP have a row in it called ‚customs and immigration‘. But as far as a have seen there is no distinction between the two even though in reality there is, e.g. at my home base. So, as Bosco already wrote, the AIP is is apparently not accurate as far as this is concerned.
Each AD mentioned in the AIP VFR that have anything like this has a CUST section that looks for example like this:
It may look completely different, however. It’s some sort of free text, German and English intermixed. Sometimes there is a distinction between customs and immigration and sometimes there isn’t. Probably the ADs decided what to publish here. There seem to be absolutely no standards or guidelines that have to be followed.
I used AC-U-KWIK (the part that is free) for rough trip planning in the past, but e.g. for Mannheim it’s complete nonsense. It says Port of entry: NO, Customs: YES.
I find this amazing, since the German police must know which airfields are entitled to get their presence, if some pilot from some foreign country outside schengen decides to fly there, or fly from there.
Or is it that every German airfield is entitled to call the police to drop in? IOW, each airfield can itself decide whether to offer Immigration, and the police cannot refuse?
This isn’t just some hypothetical thing for UK pilots (who will need Customs too, after Brexit). The UK has by far the biggest internationally flying community, of all the EU non-schengen countries. Loooads of German pilots fly down to Mali Losinj, which the ones in southern Germany can do as a day trip.
I think ACUKWIK ranks about similar to the Aviation Handbook URL I posted above. They just sell a paid version of it and have managed to get a niche business among bizjet pilots The reason one cannot rely on it is because bizjet pilots tend to just phone or email the handling company which “sorts out everything”.
This is also applicable.
And indeed this which confirms what I suggest above i.e. all German airfields potentially have immigration.
Try EDLA who have PPR for non-Schengen.
Which is difficult to find out from alternative sources…
