Mysteries of Eurocontrol

@johnh wrote:-
(My wife tells me that my problem is that I’m too British and not French enough, so I expect the rules to be followed, most of the time anyway. Whereas anyone who has grown up in France – and no doubt also Italy – knows that rules are just there to give you something to do to figure out how to work round them).

How right she is. 👍👍👍
I would add don’t ask you’ll more likely be offered the DCT as a suggestion from ATC.
The no DCT is there so that they can send you round when and if they have high traffic. ie their worse case scenario.
@Peter IFR ops are perfectly possible without SIDs and STARS. in fact many airports in France do not have a SID or STAR but do have IAPs and are perfectly open to IFR OPS.

IFR ops are perfectly possible without SIDs and STARS.

Yes – I wrote that. You need MAXDCT > 0 in the relevant airspace. Then the FP route has DCT(s) at the ends.

If there is really no reasonable route that is accepted by the IFPS, you can call the Eurocontrol help desk. They are quite helpful and can force a flight plan into the system.

I used that route once when I needed to do IFR airwork (STAY) around a particular VOR and DCTs to that VOR were not permitted (for half good reasons).

Airborne_Again wrote:

If there is really no reasonable route that is accepted by the IFPS, you can call the Eurocontrol help desk. They are quite helpful and can force a flight plan into the system.

I used that route once when I needed to do IFR airwork (STAY) around a particular VOR and DCTs to that VOR were not permitted (for half good reasons).

That is actually a very good point!
The e-mail I’ve used was [email protected]

arj1 wrote:

The e-mail I’ve used was [email protected]

I don’t know the e-mail, but the phone numbers are ‭+32 2 745 19 50‬ (Brussels) and ‭+33 1 69 88 17 50‬ (Brétigny). You can use either.

If you put yourself in the control shoes for a moment.
Eurocontrol have a number of routes from A-B in their system which they can happily validate due to there being no reason why someone being cleared for the route via xyz which by inference means you could expect to follow that route to your destination.
However, any other route they cannot validate in this manner because it demands handovers from one ATC desk to another and they may be in different countries. If the receiving ATC desk cannot take charge of that aircraft at that due to pressure of work for instance there is no way to get a direct at that time.
AIUI the Eurocontrol system will not validate anything where a handover is not pretty much guaranteed. So the worse case scenario is that you follow your validated flight plan.
If as A_A wrote if you call Eurocontrol or a BIA they may be able to negotiate with controllers to find a way that validates.

Hi Johnh
File to BORDI then DCT LFMD. Cancel IFR at BORDI and route via NIZ and EW or just direct to EW. It’s always approved and gets you out of the hair of Nice.