Unified European VFR map

ICAO does set the standards for VFR charts, hence the widely used term “ICAO chart”. Most differences are actually in the styling and in the airspace structures per se.

I agree it would be good if they were more standardized. It seems that EASA only harmonizes things where it doesn’t make sense. And where it does make sense, they fail to do it.

Oh, wait a minute…there is actually a unified VFR map for Europe…it’s called Jeppesen! (the fact that they currently don’t have a “product” is a different story…).

What surprised me the most was that 15% of all airspace busts were due to foreign aircraft.

Did they give examples of where these took place?

I would expect to see loads of busts of UK Class A, by foreign IR holders who enter UK airspace from say France and get handed over to “London 124.6” and have no idea that their IFR clearance has just been quietly trashed and that they have to remain in Class G.

If they change to 124.6 promptly then London Info (who have radar but are not allowed to admit it on the radio because they are not radar qualified ATCO pay grade) will tell you that you must now descend, but if you take your time then you will just fly straight into Class A, for which London Control no longer has your flight plan because they binned it…

This situation should have recently improved but can still happen at say FL080/090.

there is actually a unified VFR map for Europe…it’s called Jeppesen! (the fact that they currently don’t have a “product” is a different story…).

Very funny But nobody is going to do anything about this, because every European CAA runs its chart department as a profit centre. Maybe, one day, when everybody has gone electronic and their chart sales have fallen to zero, they might be amenable to some joint initiative to publish a common VFR chart. 20 years’ time?

Or they might start thinking of other methods of cost recovery for digital information like the FAA are contemplating.
http://aeronav.faa.gov/index.asp?xml=aeronav/applications

every European CAA runs its chart department as a profit centre

I beg to differ: AFAIK my CAA does not publish any charts at all. Paper VFR charts are available from the National Geographic Institute – and quoting from their own website they are under the governance of the (hahaha) minister of our national defense department.* But that may well be a Belgium-only phenomenon: I can imagine it wasn’t easy to find an authority that could reasonably be put in charge of the task and was not in danger of being regionalised. Who knows the Scots will soon face similar problems?

That said: the CAA’s are there to define the data, iow to decide who may fly where &c. AND to publish them, that is to say to make them available to the public at large, and free of charge. What EASA (or better still, ICAO) should do is to impose a standard format for publishing the data, so that producers of charts and other navigation aids have a well-defined and guaranteed source of information. It should not be hard at all to define a CSV format for navaids, waypoints, airways, and the greater part of aerodrome information; airspace and the more elusive aerodrome info might be harder, but should not be unfeasible.

*Het is een parastatale instelling van het type B die onder de voogdij van de minister van Landsverdediging staat.

DFS actually do a very good job with relatively low cost charts of Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, Denmark, Austria, Czech Republic, Switzerland, Netherlands, parts of Poland and a corner of France.

As DFS is partly run by ex Jeppesen staff who knows what the future holds?

Jeppesen had that and now give up on it. They would probably not do that if there was sufficient demand?

What I think is that the future goes the electronic way. Personally, I use Pocket FMS on my PC to plan my VFR flights and, while I am at it, print out the screen shots of the charts in such a size and manner that I can easily read them. That is what I use in flight, backed up with the “official” paper charts where available.Likewise, lots of people today already use electronic charts in flight.

The advantage of this is, that you have the updated and tailored information you really need as opposed to a chart which technically is out of date one AIRAC cycle after it’s been printed, which means often enough once you actually get it…

What I would love to see in the future would be an interactive “live” system which would take into account the status of the restricted and danger areas and only display / print those actually applicable for that flight. Of course this would mean a lot of integration of NOTAM and other sources but it would make a lot of charts quite a bit more readable…

Mooney Driver, EasyVFR by PocketFMS can do that. You can edit and hide NOTAMs that you don’t think are relevant, and then only show the remainder overlaid on the map.

EasyVFR is included in your PocketFMS subscription, so if you have an Android or iOS device just download it and work away ;)

In terms of paper chart styles, EuroControl came up with a standard European Chart style. But not many countries took it up. The only one that I know of is DFS, which Peter Mundy already said now covers a fair few countries.

Colm

I have wondered about switching to these
www.pooleys.com/prod_detail.cfm?product_id=2189

I had last years copy, and yes they are similar to one of the French ones. But like the french ones, you cant plan (maybe you can fly) just on the 1:1000000 charts alone. You need the 1:500000 for additional detail, and reference to things like disused airfieds or some unlicensed airfileds or farm strips that might make good landing sites in case of aircraft problems. I just stick with the 1:500000 charts and zoom in and out on the iPad / GNS430 if I want to see the ‘bigger picture’.

As others have said, I wish there was some commonality. I dont mind if the charts look a bit different, but if the legend, the way upper a lower designations of airspace, and use of icons was completely consisent it would help. I did laught at boscomantico’s comment though.