Thank you very much for the legal reference. Very useful.
Indochine wrote:
The police will continue to be happy with emailed GARs (when required under the Terrorism Act – but as per the above post / Bosco’s post sGAR also sends these to the police) – but the Home Office/Border Force won’t accept GARs by email any longer, so for that you need to use sGAR/an alternative approved method.
Just to add to my post, for clarity, the legal instrument requiring GARs to be submitted to Border Force via sGAR or an approved third party application is regulation 5(1) of the The General Aviation (Persons on Board, Flight Information and Civil Penalties) Regulations 2024, which came into force on 6 April 2024.
This is distinct from the requirement notify certain flights to the the police where those flights involve the common travel area: this is required under the Terrorism Act 2000.
sGAR should do both (GAR to Border Force and the police). But in certain circumstances, e.g. Northern Ireland to England/Scotland/Wales, a GAR is not required, but police notification might be (depending on whether the arrival and departure airfields have a police designation). In that case, you could just email the relevant police force(s) with details of your flight. But flights that require a GAR (e.g. arrivals in the UK from outside the CTA) require that GAR to be submitted in an approved manner.
The Home Office presentation yesterday said that email was no acceptable as they needed the data inputted into their system in a certain way so that it could be processed and the appropriate response message issued. As for why they couldn’t build a system that simply parses an email they didn’t say .. indeed the sGAR website allows you to upload most of the data using the old Excel template.
The police will continue to be happy with emailed GARs (when required under the Terrorism Act – but as per the above post / Bosco’s post sGAR also sends these to the police) – but the Home Office/Border Force won’t accept GARs by email any longer, so for that you need to use sGAR/an alternative approved method.
Of course you „can“, but you get a reply that this is no longer approved and that you must use an approved method…
Depends on where you send it. If you send it to the ncu@ address, then yes. But if you send it directly to the relevant police force (as I have been doing for years, because ncu@ didn’t always work) then they will get it just fine. And they will be happy, which is what matters 
The usefulness of this is that if you had problems with the website, shooting off that email (with the GAR attached) will probably do the job.
boscomantico wrote:
Why do think so?
Apologies, it seems you are correct – sGAR does also send GARs to the police when required. But the April 2024 version of the guidance is not very clear about it and so hopefully you can see why I was confused:
Reporting requirements under the Terrorism Act 2000
If the requirements of Paragraph 12 of Schedule 7 to the Terrorism Act 2000 apply, the GA pilot must either seek approval from, or notify, the Police Force responsible for the departure/arrival port by email using the contact details shown in Annex F.
If further information is required, then please contact the relevant county/area on the phone numbers provided in Annex D.
(Is the reference to Annex F supposed to be to Annex B)?
Further down in Annex C, D and E it is clear that sGAR (other other approved third party applications) can be used to satisfy the police notification requirement. But this is not consistent…
I recently flew to Northern Ireland from England, and then from NI to Scotland so I looked at Annex C (departing from Great Britain) and Annex E (departing from Northern Ireland) to see what I needed to file – these sections refer to Annex B (a list of email addresses/phone numbers) for the police notification (if required, depending on whether the airfields have a “police designation” but there is no mention of using the sGAR to notify the police (contrast this with the other rows, e.g. for departures to the Republic of Ireland / IoM / CI, which I had missed at the time, which expressly say that the 12 hour requirement can be satisfied by the sGAR submission, if made on time).
I wonder if this deliberately different for flights involving Northern Ireland or just poorly drafted guidance.
However, if you look at the previous version of the guidance, the same paragraph says “alternatively these requirements can also be met by using the sGAR digital application or other approved third-party applications”, and footnote 5 says “GARs submitted via the sGAR service or third party applications and submitted to the Police meet the requirement for the notification to be sent to a constable of the force where the port is located.”
Not to be overly pedantic, but I don’t think sGAR sends it to the police (for CTA flights/Terrorism Act 2000 purposes) – that you have to do via email still. It only sends it to Border Force (who deal with immigration & customs in the UK).
Why do think so?
well she can, just like before
What do you mean? Of course you „can“, but you get a reply that this is no longer approved and that you must use an approved method…
Peter wrote:
The police have “always sometimes” lost the GARs
Not to be overly pedantic, but I don’t think sGAR sends it to the police (for CTA flights/Terrorism Act 2000 purposes) – that you have to do via email still. It only sends it to Border Force (who deal with immigration & customs in the UK).
I saw the comments… Fairly typical for that site The person who said she can no longer email the locals… well she can, just like before.
The GAR site does work. The police have “always sometimes” lost the GARs, which is why you should always carry the confirmation or the printed copy. Their systems have never worked 100% and I suspect they use email internally.
ZZZZ has always been a problem, for whatever reason. The police told me there are 80+ strips just in Sussex, which is a little piece of SE England!
Yes the email code login is dumb.
The website was prob90 done to blind “partially sighted” user guidelines, which is a bit silly for pilots! Then chuck in the mobile paradigm and you end up with huge fonts and lots of pages. That’s just the price paid for modern “usability” guidelines. But for each of us here probably working productively on a PC, there are 2 or 3 who live entirely on a phone, so you can’t win them all…
This is current, for EuroGA.org, and shows how many people “live” on a phone, and the rest of us pay a usability price for that
PC/laptop (almost 100% Windows) usage is related to user IQ and EuroGA’s will be well above average, so if you do a similar survey on a more typical site you will get a much higher mobile % and then if you are building a site you may well decide to not support PCs/laptops at all. And you can be sure whoever built the GAR site was not using GA pilot usage!
Similarly the 109:52 IOS:Android ratio shows the wealth of the GA community.
Personally, I’ve had no issues with sGAR and I find the ability to save aircraft and crew/passenger details works well, but I do accept the website could be made a little more user friendly (currently has 9, I think, pages to click through), and I would prefer if I could log in with a username + password instead of waiting for an email log in code each time.
