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Greece enforcing slots

I can only speak about Latin American attitude but there being the manager of a category 3 airport might be seen as appealing. its good for your ego due to the perceived increase in power. Hard to understand for other people though. Sometimes major decisions or of great impact are being made based on very personal feelings,

Frequent travels around Europe

Well it seems after this Sept Im no longer going to fly to Greece. Hopefully the wx will be VFR going and coming since you cant do pop up IFR.

Last time in Croatia I felt the Govt wanted me there. No hassles. They didnt put up stupid roadblocks. Next year it will be Croatia.

Let me say as is usually the case the people in Greece could not have been nicer and friendlier. Too bad they have A**holes for their political class.

Only reason Im going is because Ive already prepaid our vacation plans. I will tell the management at the country club why we wont be back.

Before anyone says anything about US Customs and Immigration, I agree with you.

KHTO, LHTL

C210_Flyer wrote:

Hopefully the wx will be VFR going and coming since you cant do pop up IFR.

You can do pop up IFR, it’s in the law (SERA). That law applies to Greece as much as Germany. However, it is not as common as in the US where dedicated people are employed to do that so I wouldn’t use it unless something unforeseen happens.

We’ve had a couple of airports in Thailand & Cambodia recently adopting level 3 slots.

Operating into those airports has become a major hassle. Not just because of the administrative burden and basic inflexibility of the scheme.

But mostly because it brings a lot of undue operational stress running against a fairly tight clock going in & out.

I get the overall impression that airports love slot control. Which airport operator doesn’t want more control over those pesky aircraft coming & going? Slots are here to stay, and as traffic levels increase it’ll be the future of aviation.

One might argue that organising a slot is just the name of the game and mostly a question of planning ahead. However, like filing mandatory VFR flight plans and adhering strictly to predefined VFR routings, limiting yourself to arriving & departing within a narrow band of time just sucks when you’re a private flyer. It’s that freedom of flight thing again.

Hodja wrote:

limiting yourself to arriving & departing within a narrow band of time just sucks when you’re a private flyer.

It s*cks when there is no reason for the restriction. I think Greece is off the list for me too… I’ll wait to pass definitive judgement until Peter gets back from Greece in September.

LFPT, LFPN

Greece is not a problem Aviathor, it’s easy and pleasant to fly there. I’ve been there more than 10 times in the last few years. An absolute no-brainer.

The exact implementation details will be interesting.

If the process is just quoting a slot number in the flight plan, it will be like Bournemouth EGHH! You phone the man in the hut for the 4-digit code. ATC used to ask for it when inbound but they seem to have given up lately.

It’s the same process but worse if flying an N-reg into Turkey. In that case you obtain the number via a non-trivial process and you have a very short time to read it out on the radio before actually entering Turkish airspace, and one feels one is going to get intercepted if the number is not read out.

I guess the Greek implementation will be just getting the number from the handler and putting it on the FP.

The only possible nasty would be if they insist, Friedrichshafen-style, on an exact arrival time and, Friedrichshafen-style, suspend your FP if the ETA does not fall within the slot. I would be very surprised if the Greeks did anything so vindictive however. They have not in the past shown any tendencies to screw their tourist business. At Corfu LGKR it is possible (on their historical record) but I can’t see it happening elsewhere on the islands.

Currently there is no easy way to tweak a Eurocontrol flight plan to “fix” the ETA. You can do it with EuroFPL, however, where anything can be edited before filing, so long as it still validates.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

I guess the Greek implementation will be just getting the number from the handler and putting it on the FP.

That’s clearly not what the circular posted by Achim says. They want you to obtain the slot yourself, except on weekends, when the slot coordinator office is closed and the airport handler will give it to you.

My experience with airport slots in Germany is that they are not interested in the exact compliance with the booked time. The only thing they care about is that you do have a slot and possibly that it more or less matches your actual arrival time. I would never let me bother or distract by things such as an airport slot time.

Mainz (EDFZ) & Egelsbach (EDFE), Germany

There is no “Friedrichshafen style”, Peter – that’s only for the AERO show!

If Greek slots aren’t heavily enforced in terms of time, and mostly constitute an advanced form of PPR it’d be ok.

A useful data point for the group would have Peter deliberately turn up, say, 5 hrs late at Sitia & see what happens.

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