La Rochelle LFBH and its Schengen-defying 48hr PN for all non-French flights

I wonder what they would do if you arrive 1010UTC?

Not risking it; they may well do just about anything even if the runway is totally empty.

Gets better. BSE don’t read email

Kind regards

PN sent 21st

Just got back from LFBH.

Peter he didn’t read your email because he is absent and that is an automatic response

Pasquier is not police; he is in OPS. I sent the email to police and a load of other people at the same time, because they normally don’t talk to each other as a matter of job demarcation.

But his auto reply confirmed the email had need received by the French email system, which proved to be extremely useful. Without this evidence, the police would have blocked my flight, because they pretended they never got the PN (sent on 21st). Presumably they found the email later… I asked Pasquier (who was at work by then) to call them, which he did and emailed me back. They publish no phone number (other than on the hut at LFBH, which you can hardly get remotely!) so no way to check if the PN had been received. The LFBH police phone is +33970274711 and IME they speak English well enough. They just never reply to emails, but will happily f**k your flight if they can’t find your emailed PN. So always phone them after emailing.

The police are also unaware of the 48hr PN NOTAM. They think it is 24hrs.

It is PN not PPR.

Yes but the French police clearly can pretend the PN was not received (it is only an email!) and block your flight. Or if you fly anyway, the airport might refuse a landing clearance. That why this is a totally stupid system. France does not have the German law whereby you must wait for the police for ever but still the police at LFBH illegally pretend there is such a law.

The current system is this:

On the landing fee hut is the police number and a request to phone it if you are extra schengen traffic. They then turn up. How long, depends. It could be 5 mins if there is an airline flight, or much longer if there isn’t. Nobody knows but probably 30 mins is average. So you factor this into your trip. Same on departure.

The police then make sure you exit (and later enter) via the airline terminal, so you don’t get an opportunity to see the GA gate code, because you could use that to re-enter on your return flight. Of course you can still get that code after you landed…

It’s all a PITA and you can waste hours, at yet another stupidly and arrogantly run airport.

The other fun bit is this: yes the outbound flight was delayed by 2hrs but the notam (a French military exercise, apparently) was cancelled during our flight

The following NOTAM was cancelled:
LFFA A4880/23 NOTAMN
Q) LFBB/MRLT/IV/NBO /A /0/999/4611N00112W
A) LFBH
B) 2309251000 C) 2309251108
E) RWY 09/27 RESERVED TO SKED COMMERCIAL AND BASED HEL IN CHARGE OF
PUBLIC SERVICE MISSIONS

but the police were a) unaware of the airport closure anyway and b) were unaware of the rescinding of it, and c) were unaware of the 2-hrs-delayed flight plan, so they turned up to expect the original flight and then went home. So the airport tells the police nothing, and they don’t ask the airport about delayed traffic; they just sod it and go home. So always allow 1 extra hour post-landing.

It is hugely obvious that a person is reading EuroGA and feeding this to the French police, hence the changes. So I won’t post some pretty obvious things here

A very nice but exhausting trip, with lots of worry and hours lost at each end due to staff arrogance and mismanagement.

So is this now confirmed: Only extra Schengen Traffic needs to go through this b.s?

No, all foreigners. LFBH disregards schengen, as per subject header.

but faxes get replies near instantaneously.

Well, if this was a widespread issue (which it was in aviation until about 10 years ago especially in Greece) I would get my old email2fax and fax2email services going again. These still exist. They are fairly cheap if you don’t care about what number you have. But this is ridiculous.

The UK NHS used fax until recently (or maybe still does) because it is useful if you have stupid people sending confidential data. Then you give them a fax machine and you program some function keys to dial numbers of hospitals and GPs in the area. Fax is very good for this; email (and other IT) solutions are really difficult to deploy to stupid people (most GP reception desks are staffed by monumentally stupid staff; I have no idea why) and you end up deploying yet another new IT system which the medical profession generally hates and wants to sabotage.

Why LFBH uses fax I have no idea. I don’t think it is a special gateway for “bongo-bongo” (basically Africa) countries, any more than any other French airport. I don’t even know if their fax machine has paper in it and I can’t test it easily.

Best to email, and phone them on the number above.

It’s funny, I used to deal with two German companies exclusively by fax until very recently. Emails would only be replied to maybe 25% of the time, and usually with a few weeks delay. I think with the fax, the piece of paper is printed automatically and is harder to ignore. They used to run the same sheet of paper though an electric typewriter and overwrite something like “1.000 Stück kurzfristig ab Lager, €1,20, MFG” then fax it back within literally 2 or 3 minutes. It worked very well.

It’s funny; I used to have a German distributor who never built a website for his business. He had an Indian woman working there who did emails. When he reached about 80, he packed it all up. After 30 years, I never found a replacement disti…