Peter wrote:
The other thing is that it can be time dependent. It may be obvious to locals but for example when I flew into St Yan LFLN on a weekday they closed the FP but when I flew there on a weekend there was nobody in the tower and I was supposed to make the phone call.That’s not surprising, is it?
I believe the rule is that if there is an ATS unit on the airport and it is “obvious” from radio transmissions (or light signals, even) that the landing has been observed, then the flight plan will be closed.
boscomantico wrote:
If the AFIS is active, then they will close the flightplan.
You can’t assume the AFIS knows about your flight plan or even has a way to find out. In Germany, there are only about 4-5 AFIS that have a flight plan terminal. In other countries it is more widespread to inform AFIS about flight plan. I believe in Switzerland they use fax for that purpose until today.
What I wanted to say — if there is a tower, don’t worry about the whole flight plan stuff. If something didn’t go as it should, it’s not your worry. For all other airports, make sure the appropriate action is taken.
Achimha is correct. Most AFIS will close your flight plan for you, but you can’t assume that (like you can with a tower).
AFIS do it as a curtousy, but they can’t always do so. Not all have AFTN terminals. Indeed in the UK, I think some got rid of theirs after big price hikes 1 or 2 years ago.
Just ask after landing if they can close your plan for you.
Alexis wrote:
Sometimes I use “arrival hhmm” in Telegram (autorouter). Seems to work fine.
It didn’t seem to have worked for me the other day on one of my plans. Was going to report to Achim, but I have a problem accessing autorouter at work (we have some special browswer setup and can’t seem to authenticate), so haven’t done so.
I called the number to close flight plan (now apparently +33 1 56 30 13 01, no longer the IFR-VFR number), and they said they hadn’t seen anything closing the plan (he pretty much asked if I was G-XXXX when I called)
I doubt an ARR message will serve to close a flight plan. It might, or it might not.
This came up years ago in connection with the UK AFPEX tool which gives one direct AFTN access. You could send a DEP message or an ARR message, etc.
Peter wrote:
I doubt an ARR message will serve to close a flight plan. It might, or it might not.
An ARR message is the pure definition of closing a flight plan. Any other way (besides cancel) would involve an accident investigation 
The job of AIS is to receive all flight plans within their area of responsibility and monitor them to ensure that for each flight plan there is a corresponding close event (CNL or ARR).
