While closing the plan is important the moment to really watch out is if you land at some place which was not on your plan. For example fly to the next big airport for an IFR low appraoch, then continue to that little field as they have great lunch. Now if you forget about the plan AIS will have no destination / alternate airport to call and things can get out of control.
boscomantico wrote:
NOT switch iyou phone to flight mode in flight
True but switch off roaming. It is too easy to fly over a little country like Montenegro etc. which is not in the EU and which might then charge you a fortune for some data.
Found at one of the Czech aerodromes (LKMH if I remember correctly):
Last Item of Shutdown checklist (and first item on Before Start Check is “ForeFlight Plan → Packed” :)
boscomantico wrote:
I know it shouldn‘t be relied upon, but the most important thing is to put your phone number into the flightplan, and to NOT switch iyou phone to flight mode in flight.
This. If you don’t remember to close it, they will remember for you. Although I can hardly imagine using my cell phone in flight…
On my recent trip to Gap (see “What have you done the weekend of 25th June” thread) we landed there at around 21:30 local time. No ATC to close the flight plan. The funny thing is, we barely exited the runway when the phone rang: it was Marseille (if I remember correctly) asking if we were on the ground. Wow, that was fast. “Yes, we just landed, as a matter of fact we have not even shut down the engine yet”, I said.
The guy countered with “Per the radar trace, you have been on the ground longer than that.” Maybe he lost me in the mountains?
“Have you closed your flight plan?” he asked. “I was about to call you for this after reaching parking position, but while we are at it could you please do it?” Which he did.
In the UK this issue doesn’t exist; flight plans just get automatically closed somehow… you are supposed to let somebody know if you are flying to somewhere wild where you might just vanish for ever, like N Wales or Scotland 
Is there a list of European countries that support closing a flight plan via sending an arrival message? For VFR? For IFR?
AFAIK this should work everywhere but you need to inject an AFTN message via some AFTN gateway.
KBLIHAEX is a popular (US based) service.
I suspect the reason this doesn’t always work is that a real AFTN mailbox is not free; in fact, from vague memory, it isn’t at all cheap at some significant fraction of 1 USD.
Skydemon use EuroFPL.eu for flight plan related stuff but I don’t know who they use for FP closure messages. And in the UK they get zero feedback because the UK doesn’t need FP closure.
There may be a way via a Eurocontrol B2B gateway but that works only for Z Y I flight plans, but it is probably free.
The only person who really knows the answers is Achim (of Autorouter) but in 2018 he bought a TBM, more or less dropped out of “GA flying”, and left EuroGA His Autorouter partner Thomas duly followed him out and was not seen again.
Others who know are certain ATCOs but they are staying quiet.
Why don’t you just ring a BRIA and close the plan when you shut down. I ring 00 33 1 56 30 13 01.
But there are other numbers.
ATS normally remind you to close the flight plan when landing.at an uncontrolled field.
closing flightplans via SD never worked reliably, across all countries
Well, seems to work pretty good today, not sure what happened last week…
Well, now stating the obvious, but just because the app shows „closed“, does not mean the message has reached the right place…
Enjoy the fantastic beaches up there.
