Autorouter updates (merged)

GrahamB

Who exactly are you talking to along that route?

Are you getting a London Control service in the Class G bits and, if not, how are you getting into Class A?

I don’t know if Welshpool will call up London Control for a provisional departure clearance.

It would be interesting to know how exactly you do it.

When I did that myself, they got me to enter CAS at some intersection, but I never did it out of Welshpool. But, more often, the ATCU (Manchester Control at the time) had tossed out the Eurocontrol flight plan because it was substantially OCAS.

In the UK, you can get Eurocontrol to validate more or less anything in Class G, so there is an unlimited range of Class G routes which one could fly.

Also, try to use FL070 as the minimum level in the UK, not the FL040 default.

@achimha – thanks for the explanation, although its not half the flight OCAS, but 75nm out of 242nm i.e. 31%. Welshpool doesn’t feature in the SRD as it doesn’t have any IAPs.

@peter – it’s very straightforward. Welshpool are A/G, so I get airborne and arrange the clearance via London Info. I give them an estimate for the join and I have 70 or so miles for them to come back to me with the clearance; I’m normally given the squawk and change to London Control about 10 miles before the join. My IR training was all done at an airfield OCAS, so organising clearances via London Info became second nature.

Things seem to work now more or less, except that when I have a shortcut on my iPad, clicking there brings me to the homepage of EuroGA where there is no link to the autorouter.

If somebody changed someting: thanks!

Some work was (and still is) being done on it today.

The URL which ought to work with your existing EuroGA login is router.euroga.org or http : //router.euroga. org (without the spaces) if you need the full version.

it’s very straightforward. Welshpool are A/G, so I get airborne and arrange the clearance via London Info. I give them an estimate for the join and I have 70 or so miles for them to come back to me with the clearance; I’m normally given the squawk and change to London Control about 10 miles before the join. My IR training was all done at an airfield OCAS, so organising clearances via London Info became second nature.

Sure… I tried it myself just now, using fly-through waypoints all the way to SITET (i.e. all the way to French airspace) as per your route, without success. So currently manually modifying your route is the best way.

The average pilot from the Continent will get a heart attack when he suddenly realizes that he’s signed up for a VFR flight in IMC We have already had one guy (from the UK, too!) who thought he could fly across the width of the UK at FL040, because it did validate, and he wasn’t at all happy afterwards.

The “proper way” in this case is at FL150

with a 7% overhead

Of course I realise (a) this is not what you want and (b) in UK airspace you can do a long route fragment in Class G which doesn’t need FL150 and which not only validates but can also be flown with (eventually) a service from London Control, but it is an interesting challenge as to how to translate this concept to a “European pilot” who doesn’t know about these hacks, and will have an increased chance of killing himself flying a long section in “UK quasi VFR” in potentially dodgy weather and probably without a topo map running on his GPS.

This issue pops up in other places e.g. the Cannes/Nice area where somebody (a Brit, no less) killed himself and his wife not long ago because he couldn’t get to the FL150 which is required in that area so he flew “VFR” in (presumably) IMC and didn’t do it right.

The routing service you use is probably the one which stores past routes and dishes them out to anybody wanting the same route, or a similar route fragment. That’s fine, until you get a route cooked up by a local from Wales and dish it out to somebody from say Germany

I have not developed the router here but I guess a solution that exists should involve a pretty obvious warning.

he’s signed up for a VFR flight in IMC

While I obviously get your point, I just don’t think everybody is that helpless.

In priniple, you seem to equate VFR=uncontrolled, IFR=controlled and also assume everybody else in Europe thinks the same way. As you know perfectly, IFR is merely a set of rules the pilot is supposed to follow. They do – per se – not say anything about “control” and stuff like that. Many pilots from Europe know this, either from their home country or flights to Scandinavia for example. So, It’s not a “VFR flight in IMC”. It’s – well – IFR in IMC.

Please don’t paint it all black and white.

I think my point was there there isn’t any obvious way to autoroute such routes.

They are 100% “street knowledge”.

Or, you can knock them up with a map, preferably with some knowledge of which airway intersection is the one at which London Control are likely to give you a climb into CAS (which is AFAIK not public knowledge, though it may be in MATS Pt 2).

I don’t like this either. Today I tried to autoroute EGKA-EGHE (Scilly Isles – the place you can still see a Mk 1 Ford Escort). The proper route is all the way down to France. The answer is there is no route at all, on which you will get an IFR service. It’s mostly Class G. Autorouting is meaningless. But a foreign pilot, not used to UK OCAS hacking, isn’t going to know that. He will get the rubbish route and complain.

Sure a lot could be improved and I am sure Achim and Tom will get around to doing more work. I have no involvement in the router other than, via the link to EuroGA, hope to bring more people to EuroGA which I think is a very worthwhile project. But I’ve been flying around the UK, IFR, for 12 years, and I can’t see a way of solving this issue – apart from somebody sitting down and hand-hacking together a load of these partly-OCAS routes and stuffing them into a database. Obviously, this is exactly what the more established routing tools have done. They have had 6 years of pilot complaints and have gradually built up various plausible routes. But you won’t get a continuous IFR service on most of them. You have to “know” that if you e.g. depart in Class G, and 50nm down the road there is a bit of Class D (with an airport inside), that airport’s ATC will not even have your flight plan, and you have no clearance to proceed. With a Class A entry, there is an extra step (London Control via London Info, generally).

How would you solve this problem, boscomatico?

But you won’t get a continuous IFR service on most of them.

What is an “IFR service”?

You have to “know” that if you e.g. depart in Class G, and 50nm down the road there is a bit of Class D (with an airport inside), that airport’s ATC will not even have your flight plan, and you have no clearance to proceed.

Sorry, but to me this all makes sense. The above is not a flight “along airways”.

So: fly the route, be aware of controlled airspace around you, and if you want to cross it, call for a clearance (no advance FPL required for that). Why should this be any different whether you’re following visual or instrument flight rules??

I know…the foreigners… but it is also partly their fault. Some assume that if they’re going IFR, they don’t need to give a single thought to which class of airspace they’re flying through. That’s just not the way it’s supposed to work.

All true, but this is nothing to do with the automatic Eurocontrol IFR route generator.