Had the same experience in Tarbes recently. Upon departure by chance spotted a small note „all int flt call customs“ so I did. They turned up, checked passports and left again.
Does anyone know if this is based on customs and/or immigration? Is it because of schengen suspension due to covid?
How is anyone flying to france supposed to know about it? Can someone decipher the notam?
1) ★ CUSTOMS AND POLICE :
TO MARCH 28 : 0700-1700
MARCH 29 TO 31 : 0600-1600
FROM APRIL 01 : 0500-2000
PN INCLUDING OF PASSENGERS AND CREW (24HR WEEK, 48HR WEEK-END AND
HOL) TO :
- BSE-TARBES(A)DOUANE.FINANCES.GOUV.FR
- DIV-TOULOUSE2(A)DOUANE.FINANCES.GOUV.FR
- CODT-BORDEAUX(A)DOUANE.FINANCES.GOUV.FR
OUTSIDE THESE HOURS : O/R PN AS DESCRIBED ABOVE
(EXCEPT RE-ROUTING).
PN FOR FLIGHTS OUTSIDE THE EUROPEAN UNION (ICELAND, LIECHTENSTEIN,
NORWAY, SWITZERLAND) AS DESCRIBED ABOVE.
Frans wrote:
(except when coming from Switzerland, which needs customs clearance).
Can I ask is that the full Notam?
I am surprised by what happened to @Bluebeard. I wonder if there is something of a miscommunication here. Not on behalf of Bluebeard but I wonder if someone has sent out a note to these airport staff or customs officers that has been badly worded or mistakenly read. Normally if it is an official letter it would have had the relevant arrêtes quoted on it and they should have been able to tell Bluebeard why this was the case. The fact that no one could answer was strange.
With regards to France to Spain or Vice Versa there may be a reason depending on actual date of travel in that France has been going on and off Spain’s Covid red list for what seems to be no logical reason, at least in France. There may of course be a very good reason from the Spanish Government’s point of view.
As for the NOTAM from Snoopy. I read that in a different way. But maybe I am wrong. But I read it that if you need customs or immigration or both up you will need to give prior notice 28hrs in advance or 48 hrs at weekend. Up to 28th March they will be in attendance from 0700 to 1700 from 29th March etc etc.and then goes onto give the addresses where you send the prior notice.
However it does say that you can request custom or immigration presence outside of these hours.
It goes on to say you don’t need the prior notice if you have been rerouted.
And finally it lists countries outside EU and says PN is the same for them as for everyone else.
The thing is that those coming from countries within the Schengen area do not need immigration controls.
Those coming from the EU do not need customs controls.
So someone coming.from a Schengen country within the EU would not need either and should then have no need to PN at all.
The problem is it is obviously a bit clumsy wording or there is some temporary rule or law which as far as I can see is not in the AIP or AIC or NOTAM supplements that the officers on site are reading it differently or putting their own spin on things.
If it is to do with Covid and the showing of Pass Sanitaire, why do they need police or border force officers (other than perhaps Spain on or off)? The staff at all restaurants and bars can do the job so why not airport staff?
I’ve been flying to multiple French “intermediate” airports over the last year or so and can confirm that it’s now basically standard procedure to ask for PPR even for intra Schengen flights for all airports that in principle have customs/immigration. As mentioned by @Ibra, there’s nothing that would prevent you going to a smaller airfield in these scenarios. I guess the reason for this is the double Schengen suspension by France, one for “terrorism” which has been prolonged every 6 months since 2014, and one for “Covid”.
Two aspects in this annoy me the most.
1) The different procedures that everyone invents and that you first have to find out about, including notice periods of sometimes 48h or more (if you have to do it before the weekend, during working hours…). Sometimes you need to fill out some web form, other times write an e-mail with undefined indications. Sometimes you get a confirmation, sometimes you don’t. This all creates an atmosphere of fear, uncertainty and doubt where if somebody wants to annoy you because they don’t like your face, they probably can. That’s unworthy of any “état de droit”. Also, the breaking of overarching law, such as when the local procedures involve sending your “pass sanitaire” to someone via unencrypted e-mail. Now we seem to find it acceptable that you have to send personal health information in advance via e-mail, which will probably be stored somewhere indefinitely in some mailbox “just in case”. And the EU system explicitly was introduced on the premise that you would be the keeper of your QR code and it would never have to leave your phone/paper… in theory. As soon as some jobsworth official thinks they can make up some rules, they will, and it’s either you comply or you might get in trouble…
Needless to say, sometimes this 48h PPR requirement is in conflict with other notice periods, such as airport slots that you cannot book more than 24h in advance… Not even mentioning the case where you need to change your plans on short notice. This is exactly why we’re flying our own planes and not by airline.
2) The supposition that we now need to “check papers” to 100 %. What about having a general rule and then doing spot checks? I don’t want to live in a world where 100 % rule compliance needs to be enforced at every single step of the way. This pass sanitaire isn’t so important as to systematically have to put systems in place where they’re checked 100 % of the time. We’ve never applied this thinking in any other area of our lives. How many times are you being checked for the validity of your pilots’ licence including relevant class ratings, language proficiency, medical and ARROWPC documents for your plane? Why should this work differently for the health pass now?
And by the way, I find the checking of “Ihre Papiere bitte” by restaurant waiters and any other fellow citizens even worse as a principle.
Specifically for French airports this passport check for intra Schengen flights seems to have ramped up in the last 18 months – before it was an intermittent thing but now every arriving flight needs to go through passport control – drives me nuts, its as if the bureaucrats really hated ceding their power to dictate who what where and how.
And like the ocean they just creep back and wear away on freedoms – this is a terrbile thing to say but – we need more lawyers in EU for civil liberties.
@Rwy20 you seem to be having a tough time of it. I have never been asked to send my passe sanitaire by email and I don’t know any reason why I would.
I can’t find any reference to the terrorism law currently suspending Schengen or EU customs. Do you have a reference for that?
I agree with Ibra as far as I can see these rules on customs and immigration checks for EU and Schengen are being set locally. I have not seen any National edict that backs it up to make it legal. Whether there is one would take a lot of time the J.O.covers a massive range and would need a lot of time to sift through.
The other problem is I have not heard of a French pilot coming back and for between Schengen EU countries who has been affected by this. Now that could be that they simply ignore it because many are based at a particular mid to large sized field or they fly in and out of the small unmanned fields. It would be interesting to hear from any French pilot who has experienced this and if they got to the bottom of why.
How many times have you flown INTO France in the last 12 months?
And how many times of these have you used a PPF airport?
I doubt it’s only Covid or Shengen suspension, this has been the case since 2014?
- In some aerodromes the “private ops guy” wants 24h PNR for any INTL flights (you end up having to see DGI/PAF who really don’t care 
)
- In some places this is in the NOTAMS/AIP which is fair (too many to ignore: La Rochelle, Picardie, Limoges, Avignon, Colmar, Cuers…)
- Covid restrictions & Shengen suspension, there has been extra confidential communications to DGI/PAF by local authorities
Officially, Shengen is not suspended as far as press & public are concerned at the national level but some regions are just doing what they like
For instance, as of today you have “a covid restriction” between Ostend-Calais, Paris-Ostend but not Bergerac-Ostend…
I regularly fly between UK-France (it’s not easy to keep track of the picture), I did Italy/Switzerland last year and things worked seamlessly but took risks, going to France/Spain seemed very complicated last year, you had to use PoE in Spain from France which I don’t enjoy, I prefer small places where I avoid human contacts, so I skipped, even going Cannes-Corsica last year, we took the bet to go to Propriano, they required PCR tests but it was not clear if we had to land in Ajaccio to get someone to check it, on the way back we had to use the main terminal gate and we saw customs at Cannes who asked briefly who we are and what we were doing there…
Snoopy wrote:
It doesn’t https://www.euroga.org/forums/flying/13465-eu-regulations-2020-877-all-eu-airports-have-customs-without-pnr-pprAs discussed in that other topic, I wouldn’t recommend anybody to just fly without PNR towards customs. It’s the most difficult breed to deal with. But if you like, feel free to try it out and see what happends if you appeal on the new EU law.
Surely one has to avoid that butFrans wrote:
But if you like, feel free to try it out and see what happends if you appeal on the new EU law
You may get away with it if you & aircraft are citizens of the country and everybody is expecting you to come back home if you & aircraft are visitors: you want to cover all the corners, not just customs/immigration, OPS & ATC may have a very different opinion and interpretation of that EU law…
before it was an intermittent thing but now every arriving flight needs to go through passport control
It’s usually a request by private security and operation, note that many regional airports have now been privatised, next will be mandatory handling & security for EU flights (actually load of places do enforce it from time to time, e.g. Lille LFQQ), best will be using tailored forma in some myF###Ha&&&.com…
Ibra wrote:
Officially, Shengen is not suspended as far as press & public are concerned at the national level
Since when do the press and the public decide this?
https://ec.europa.eu/home-affairs/system/files/2021-11/Full%20list%20of%20notifications_en.pdf
Full_list_of_notifications_en_pdf
Or is your comment meant to say that the colloquial term “Schengen suspension” isn’t the same as the official “notifications of the temporary reintroduction of border control at internal borders”?
[ local copy of PDF added – it would be super nice if people did that ]
