VFR flight planning issues

Peter wrote:

Not legally required for water, surely?

In Fance it is. If you fly to Corsica, you do need a FPL.

Peter wrote:

Does Europe have any airspace E F G which is mandatory-radio for day VFR?

Yes. There are some airports that have bizarre constructs in France. Look for example at Toussus. It is actually in class G airspace but within restriction area LF-R-35A/B which mandates clearance from Toussus TWR for penetration. Why did they not make that a class D?

Vannes (LFRV) is an AFIS airport located within LF-R-278 which mandates two-way radio contact with AFIS. Why did they not just make it a TIZ?

In the old days in Norway, there used to be a class F around AFIS airports, but that has since been replaced by a TIZ (Traffic Information Zone) in class G

@Hunnicat

Many thanks for your post! I really appreciate that someone on the “other end” would go to the trouble of researching the issue and then draft such a detailed explanation. May you live long and prosper! (and I hope it’s you on the phone next time I’m trying to sort out a problem!)

I found it quite interesting as a VFR pilot who uses SkyDemon to file, have had flight plans rejected, and had to resubmit them by phone or fax with waypoints named.

@Hunnicat
Many thanks for the research and the posting. That was great to get a better understanding of what is happening behind the scene. I’m glad to know now, to avoid to problems next time.

Hunnicat wrote:

But which pilot is aware of addressing FPLs according AIP ENR 1.11?

We are not. Or if we are, why should we be bothered with looking up the addressees? We expect the tool to do this for us.

Thanks for contributing, Hunnicat. Very interesting to hear your side of the coin.

Hunnicat wrote:

We accept in route (field 15) city names, ICAO points, VFR points, coordinates. But as I wrote before coordinates are not so “popular” for ARO/ATS (I think). You can search faster city names rather the coordinates.

The trouble with this is that it varies from country to country. Place names are not ICAO compliant. Neither are VFR reporting point. Obviously for a human, place names are much easier to read. Here in Ireland ATC also want place names, as they have no way of plotting the lat/lon. But some other countries have systems that reject flight plans if they don’t do everything correctly. I’ve had RocketRoute investigate some flight plans filed through EasyVFR which went missing. In a number of cases it was automatically rejected for technical errors; errors that a human eye would never see.

The one good thing about computers is that every time you find such a technical issue, you can permanently fix it so that it never occurs again, making the whole thing more reliable.

But really, VFR flight plans differ from country to country. What country A demands, country B prohibits! I’m happy to leave the technicalities of that to RocketRoute on our behalf

KBLIHAEX as I know is not responsible for addressing. They (only) offer/prepare some AFTN addresses

If you google on KBLIHAEX you soon find that this is the address of the American AFTN gateway used by various well known electronic flight plan filing services. KBLI is here.

All that the KBLIHAEX gateway does is implement a gateway, possibly from email or from some web (HTTP etc) interface. All the message addressing has to be specified by the user.

The topic of VFR addressing has a very long history… and it changes periodically. Different countries want it done in different ways. It’s in the AIP somewhere. It must be quite a job for somebody to keep up with the changes. Do a search here for “vfr addressing” and you get some past threads.

FWIW I have had electronically filed flight plans rejected in the distant past because they contained some invalid character, which I could not see and thus could not delete

In 99,9% I have problem to contact KBLIHAEX

There is nobody there. It is just an AFTN gateway. If you send a message to that address, they will (should) pass it to their client e.g. Skydemon (who use EuroFPL for FP filing), Rocketroute, Autorouter (who don’t do VFR but AIUI have to use the AFTN for Z or Y FPs).

There is an expectation in the ARO business that there will be a real live person at the other end, but that is not very likely because usually it is just 1 person and he has to sleep sometime. This is what electronic FP filing has brought about, like it or not

For example, thanks to the UK AFPEX system, I have my own personal AFTN address. I haven’t checked that mailbox for a few months…