Yesterday, following this AR-filed route, FL080
Biarritz said No
I also got a No a few days before
I asked and was told they are not flyable below FL200.
Evidently France doesn’t supply the restrictions to Eurocontrol to validate against, but maybe these are flyable sometimes?
Try to make the same flight on a saturaday or sunday you will have a nice direct !
Yes, but it was planned for Friday and Monday, yet it still validated.
Presumably you have just had a problem flying this route, were on an IFR flight plan and this is related to that fact and the desire to fly the route IFR?
Im not IFR qualified, but I have flown along that entire coast several times VFR at various altitudes between 1000ft and 6000ft weekdays and weekends. (Im based at an aerodrome along your route).
However, I do know there are several blanket NOTAMs out since the summer concerning Drone/Missile exercises along that bit of coast and mostly these are up to FL195, so that might account for the “above FL200” bit if they are actually being used when you are flying. Does the IFR router account for these?
Regards, SD..
I don’t think any autorouting tool checks notams. It would add a massive layer of complexity, especially as notams don’t have a reliably standard machine-readable format.
I think the issue here is that France has not notified Eurocontrol that this airspace is closed, or when it is closed if not always.
On weekends there is normally not a problem, since the military are mostly shut.
Peter wrote:
I don’t think any autorouting tool checks notamsHow do they account for all the R-areas activated via a trigger-NOTAM then? Do trigger-NOTAMs follow a standardized machine-interpretable format?
They don’t.
FWIW I have been a beta tester for probably every autorouting tool developed ever since Autoplan was written in 2008. All of them work by routing the airway maze (the airway database, and navaids and intersections, has always been available freely from Eurocontrol) using various algorithms (all open source, developed in the 1960s, and running almost instantly on modern hardware) and then the route is submitted to Eurocontrol for validation. Any tempo restriction is chucked out with a suitable error message which is parsed and the route is modified accordingly and re-submitted for validation. AFAIK the only real variation since 2008 is that you download a database of restrictions which are incorporated into the routing, before submission for validation. These restrictions are not current and complete however, which is why the iterative validation/re-route process is still required.
Additional tweaks include stuff like standard route documents, and various localised tweaks which the programmers ritually hate doing 
The routing tools don’t look at notams. It is the responsibility of each participating country to supply Eurocontrol with all the information. Then, a validated route “should” be flyable.
There are many countries which don’t supply all the info to Eurocontrol, knowingly and intentionally. Reasons include: can’t be bothered, desire to protect national briefing office jobs (so they get loads of calls from pilots trying to work out routes), etc.
Of course you still get the remaining scenario which is restrictions which pop up after you got airborne. These can only be done tactically by ATC. Whether the two cases I saw in France were in that category, I don’t know. One of the many great things about IFR is that you just file a validated route and fly. You don’t have to get enroute notams; only airport notams. But there are several French ATCOs here.
Peter wrote:
It is the responsibility of each participating country to supply Eurocontrol with all the information.
IFPS manual
The ACK message is a means whereby the IFPS indicates successful processing of a submitted message against the environmental data held by the Network Manager at the time of processing that message.
Such a processing may only take into account the criteria specified by the relevant Member States against which they require flight plan messages to be checked by the IFPS. As such, successful processing by the IFPS cannot guarantee that a processed message is fully in accordance with each Member State’s requirements, where they are not known to the NM CACD, nor does it ensure the correctness of any part…..
Flight planning is PIC responsibility.
The following route (EGKA-EGWE) validates : “N0154F040 DCT KK209 DCT OTSID DCT BENPA DCT BUR DCT VATON DCT NEKSA DCT LAVNO DCT”
It takes you over EGKK, EGLL, EGLC, at about 4000 ft. Do you really expect to fly such route because it validates ?
I don’t think there is that much incentive to have a strategic solution to the “notams problem” at Euro-control/Auto-router levels, commercial routes are well standardized and most will stay away from this mess, for the rest, the problem is thrown back to local ATC and airspace users, who somehow learn about their aispace restrictions from the next guy who landed or wrote the notam…but it still a problem for planning if you fly a long way in GA, especially VFR
A good thing to have is phone/email attached to many open-ended or fuzzy notams, at least you can speak (= spam) the persons who wrote them, especially, if they wrote does not make sense or is not proportionate with safety
Guillaume, we are in complete agreement!
The UK is one of the many countries which refuses to supply Eurocontrol with the data required.
One part-solution, done by the routing tool, would be a checkbox option to route only inside CAS.
Flight planning is PIC responsibility.
Yes, taking a purist philosophical standpoint, but for the pilot, there is no practical way around this… other than to participate on EuroGA and learn that some “valid” routes work while other “valid” routes are total crap
I do it by never using the default AR setting (which gives you a FL040 base, which is ridiculous for most of Europe, and I have told Achim about this many times) but routing between FL090 and FL190. Same in Foreflight which obviously has the same problem, except that its base is, ahem, I think, FL000, and any attempt to change this to FL090-190 doesn’t “stick”. The old ex-2008 tools, Autoplan and FlightPlanPro, worked correctly in this respect.
However this is getting away from the topic of route development through TRAs. Someone might hold a view that a pilot should get the enroute notams and use fly-by waypoints (not supported by Foreflight BTW) to shape the route. I can assure you that practically nobody in the IFR world will be doing that. The only time anyone might look at enroute notams is if the routing tool keeps producing a totally crappy route and you want to find out why. One old case I had is here and the offending notam was buried among thousands of others (all written up in there). That was also mil activity, but back then I didn’t have the tools to deal with it and just cancelled the second half of the trip. Upon returning home, one of the specialist router developers unearthed the offending notam…
but it still a problem for planning if you fly a long way in GA, especially VFR
Yes, for VFR you have to get all notams, enroute and terminal. There is no route validation and ATC is not responsible for anything for you, especially not OCAS.
