I remember few years ago Slovenian ATC specifically required 2 flight plans for following situation: taking off from Croatian airport, performing approaches to Slovenian airport, returning to Croatian airport without previous landing to Slovenian airport.
In the UK, some airfields will not activate flightplans for ‘other’ traffic.
In this case you would call London Information. The generic FIS.
They will activate any valid Flightplan.
Perhaps there is a FIS that you could have used?
Airborne_Again wrote:
Airborne_Again01-Jan-24 21:2805
Emir wrote:
It’s perfectly ok to file two plans in such situation and activate second plan after overflying destination airport of the first plan.Yes, that makes sense, but Swedish ATC would also refuse. I have firsthand experience of a similar situation. (Except I did intend to make a TGL at the first destination airport but because of an extended hold on approach, I skipped that.) ATC refused to open my return flight plan so instead I had to divert to my return airport while still on the outbound flight plan!
Not withstanding details regarding national authority requirements for FPL filing.
The filed flightplan constitutes a form of legal document and include numerous relevant details such as PIC and for Customs, Immigrations and Quarantine (CIQ), and other purposes the point DEP, DEST and ALTN. are required to be designated. Of course there´s often additional admin comms required in preparation for CIQ.
If you don´t actually intend to do CIQ in a country it could (depending on the authorities) be considered a technical stop without the requirement for CIQ.
I understand that the flight in question by the OP was an intra-European (even intra-Scandinavian) flight and that no CIQ would/should be required, but again principally, and under normal operations, a flight should commence and conclude according to the ATC filed FPL. There are certain special procedures whereby you enroute can/may change your destination airport, but that comes with other, normally, pre-arranged requirements. It would be an inflight change of DEST.
Obviously, and unfortunately, national authorities are administrating this differently. In some countries, like Emir´s example, there are certain specific requirements to be allowed to conduct an international flight while performing (not even landing) approaches in “another” country.
In some countries you won´t be allowed to close you´re flightplan in the air – and then obviously you can´t activate another (your return) FPL with the same ATC unit. This makes me wonder what would happen if you close (airborne) the FPL via eg. SkyDemon and then call ATC to activate? I haven´t tried and not sure I want to try..
Yeager wrote:
The filed flightplan constitutes a form of legal document and include numerous relevant details such as PIC and for Customs, Immigrations and Quarantine (CIQ)…In some countries you won´t be allowed to close you´re flightplan in the air…
In my case it was a domestic flight. Activating and closing flight plans in the air is both accepted and regularly practised in Sweden. However, I was talking to the tower so they knew I would not actually land.
Another similar situation:
- I filled two plans: LJBL→LDLO (with RMK/ LOW PASS NO LDG) and LDLO→LDVA
- after performing low pass and taking pics I asked ATC to close 1st plan and open 2nd one
Or this one:
- I filed LDVA→LDZA (with RMK/ TWO APPR) and LDZA→LDVA
- After 2nd missed approach ATC closed 1st plan and opened 2nd one
It would seem different countries have very different rules. In France an flight planned under IFR from Brest LFRB to Quimper LFRQ shooting the approach and going missed then returning to Brest would require 2 FPLs. You will receive your clearance for the return usually during the approach.
An airborne FPL can be filed even for crossing borders but it has to be filed in sufficient time for all necessary recipients to receive the plan. In the case of crossing borders there is a minimum time listed in French regs.
What is in SERA?
I had actually landed at a strip in Denmark and returned to Sweden the next day. But as I wanted to fly around a little bit I did not want to file a flight plan from the airport of departure and then having to stick to any track.
I therefore set up the plan at crossing airports with the plan to activate it when overflying. That is when the scolding began. What is curious is that ATC hinted that a touch and go would be sufficient to make them happy. I actually thought about doing a really low fly over the runway (the non towered airport was closed) and just tell them I did a TaG. 
Maybe the takeaway is that I should have used some kind of waypoint and not an airport.
Nope, that wouldn’t work either.
You should have filed the actual strip that you took off from as your ADEP. Just use ZZZZ in field 13 if it doesn’t have an ICAO code.
I have never done anything like this – not needed to.
The problem is that a lot of what should be possible is simply not implemented by ATC, whose procedures have not changed in decades. For example airborne filing is closely related to all this, is supposed to be available everywhere in the EU, but has never been implemented.
You cannot have two flight plans for the same time period but one can “hack it” so it doesn’t get detected. With Eurocontrol (I Y Z) one cannot do it at all but one can overlap two VFR (V) ones or one IFR (I Z Y) and one VFR (V) one because there is no checking across stuff which lives purely on the AFTN or purely in national databases – see the two links here. The Eurocontrol database is not cross checked against anything passing around the AFTN even though the latter all ends up in national (national security related) flight plan databases.
Of course a VFR flight plan is generally activated (DEP message) when you are airborne (an IFR one probably gets a DEP message done when you are off blocks (“EOBT”), so this topic is really about doing this after you have been flying around for a while, and now want to do a flight which needs a flight plan.
Another angle on all this is that “activating” is just a DEP message, and anybody with AFTN access can generate a DEP message for you. In the UK there is the AFPEX system available to private pilots.
Two identical topic threads merged.
