Was a pretty tame arrival although the TAF looked bad. Arrived into EDTY. Very light blowing snow. Landed about 1300Z.
Picked up almost no ice on way in although the wind at ground level was 15G25. Must remember to keep airspeed up as was the longest final ever. Big advantage of inflight weather. Had great radar and metar pictures while still north of FFT. Was a trip which you would never have launched non-FIKI as TAF was poor. Will do a trip report soon.
GS for return currently zero as UK ATC has a massive software problem leading to hugely delayed flights.
Again in Germany, 214 knots GS in a non-turbo Cirrus (170 true) today. Unfortunately, it was mostly a crosswind though. Otherwise, I could have exceeded 240…
Hope you got back, Jason. I got stuck at STN (of all places!) for a few hours (CAT) Finally made it to Austria. Flights got cancelled all over the place.
Yep. Kept getting 3 hour slot delays. Finally filed to Lille (wrong Lille by the way!), the Brussels allowed me to divert to EGTK and London accepted me. Was planning to do a VFR/IFR OCAS trip out of Lille. As it happened was IFR all the way and no need to land in France.
You can file from (say) Italy to (say) Le Touquet (for Schengen purposes, on the way back to the UK) and when approaching Le Touquet you ask for a diversion to some southern UK airport.
French ATC will be happy to do it because you are practically out of their airspace by then, and London Control likewise because you will be descending shortly anyway (below CAS i.e. “VFR/IFR as you wish”).
Of course nobody would do this unless departing from an airport which has Customs, so I am not speaking from personal experience and neither have I ever heard of anybody else doing it 
I had cleared customs in Germany but what was interesting is that this was a CAS join at FL200. On another forum it was said that London TC (Terminal Control) abuts Brussels at some point as as the problem today was an AC (area control) issue, if you could get into TC you were OK. Maybe IO managed it.
Concerning those slots I found that it takes a while until you get enroute slot messages. In fact is there any need to stand by for slot messages? One could file a Z plan with rocketroute, get the ack turn off the phone and start the plane and depart VFR. Is there any rule which objects to do so?
Yes, the German AIS office which won’t give you a release when a later slot is assigned. So goal was to get airborne and sort it out in the air when you can deal with people not a computer.
Yes the release is probably the difficult part. When departing a pure VFR field they will not call up ATC so no problem but when departing an IFR airport you would have to tell them you are leaving on a VFR plan or no plan at all and then do the pick up in the air. When you also have to deal with customs this can get quite tricky. Using rocketroute sometimes you have different routes. Once I was lucky just refiling the whole flight on another route which then did not get a slot. Another approach could be to file a Y plan and then negotiate with ATC in the air that you want to stay IFR a little longer then filed. What I did not find out yet is how to termine which part of the flightplan caused the enroute slot to be assigned. This would allow to modify the plan accordingly. So far this is only try and error.
Besides has anybody ever tried to file a flight plan for example via some kind of datalink while in the air and then doing a pick up just shortly later? As the departure time would be in the past I’m not sure such a plan can be entered using the usual systems.
