Airborne_Again wrote:
However, it does not appear that you can have the flight plan end at a point in the route in the same way – the DEST/ remark has to refer to an airport, even with ZZZZ.
Do you have the PANS-ATM reference to hand? I would be interested to read that section.
In the days when Malmi, Finland (EFHF) was still open, I flew with a pilot who had his seaplane based at Malmi. We were going to his cottage, and Malmi required a flight plan for all flights. He filed EFHF to ZZZZ with the waypoint NOKKA (just outside the zone) as the destination in the remarks section. This was accepted, but I don’t know if this was special treatment, as he filed in person in the tower, and as a Finnair pilot, everybody in ATC seemed to know him.
He filed EFHF to ZZZZ with the waypoint NOKKA (just outside the zone) as the destination in the remarks section
That is bound to work in any flight plan processing system which supports ZZZZ, because ZZZZ is not checked for whether it is on land, or in the middle of the Pacific 
In fact I am very sure you could file the ZZZZ coordinates as the middle of the Kremlin and nobody would pick it up; it just isn’t the sort of thing programmers will be checking, and checking whether e.g. the lat/long is within a specific country is actually very hard (impossible, I’d say).
Peter wrote:
In fact I am very sure you could file the ZZZZ coordinates as the middle of the Kremlin and nobody would pick it up; it just isn’t the sort of thing programmers will be checking
It’s hard to check programmatically, the Dutch ARO decided to bin AFTN and hired load of people to manually dig on that
derek wrote:
Do you have the PANS-ATM reference to hand? I would be interested to read that section.
For ZZZZ as departure it is on page A2-8 and for arrival on page A2-12. The page numbers are for the 16th edition (2016) of PANS-ATM.
What is the bottom line on this?
Obviously one can file non-surface endpoints, as ZZZZ, because that remains unchecked/unnoticed. But is this of any use? ATC probably can’t see where the ZZZZ point lies. The system just isn’t set up for this.
Peter wrote:
That is bound to work in any flight plan processing system which supports ZZZZ, because ZZZZ is not checked for whether it is on land, or in the middle of the Pacific In fact I am very sure you could file the ZZZZ coordinates as the middle of the Kremlin and nobody would pick it up; it just isn’t the sort of thing programmers will be checking, and checking whether e.g. the lat/long is within a specific country is actually very hard (impossible, I’d say)
In the US, this is permitted, that is to file from and to a latitude/longitude. Canada also permits it, but for VFR flight plans a place name is required. Picking up an IFR flight plan at a waypoint or navigation facility or a fix-radial-distance is also supported. As far as determining if an IFR flight plan is contained in a particular airspace or FIR, this is accomplished using polygon’s that define each FIR. For VFR flight plans, there are country polygons. In order to route a flight plan to the appropriate authority, when a point is specified that is not defined as an airport, then polygons are used.
