Peter wrote:
Clearly that is true in this case, but the pilot is not in a position to know this. He is entitled to assume that the person examining them is authorised to do it.
The pilot’s license is not valid without photo ID. That is the reason why they ask for an ID together with your license at the airport security checkpoint.
I asked the man in the handling office whether this completes the immigration check. He said no, this is just for airside access, I still need to see the police. Therefore I made sure to stay around until the police finally showed up shortly before EOBT.
It was a very pleasant experience in Avignon. French officials are strict but professional.
Peter,
sorry but ATC and Customs hardly ever work together. What you file, what you send (DLY) e.t.c. does not reach them unless they have a local arrangement, which is rare. Customs PPR means you have to tell them in a prescribed way when you arrive and when you depart. That is when they will turn up. If you are delayed or wish to start earlier, it is your duty to inform them and they will then tell you if they can accomodate you or not.
The whole PPR business in my view is one of the worst hassles these days in GA at all. In the worst case, you need an airport slot, ATC enroute slot, Customs PPR and possibly parking PPR and all of those slots need to be coordinated. In essence, that means the powers who make us do all this treat us like CAT, but even an airliner can (and frequently is) late.
I expect that in Lausanne the Customs guys know the Ops guys fairly well and therefore when they arrived to see that you are not there knew whom to ask. This may or may not work elsewhere, where customs turns up, sees that the plane they need to check is not there and leave. In that case, you would have lost your PPR as it was for e.g. 1300 not 1530…
Clearly, in many airports you can ask the ops guys to call customs to let them know and they will. In some cases they might even do so on their own when they receive a delay, but do not ever count on it.
JasonC wrote:
At these German airports they usually make it very clear when youcontact them that you need to tell them the specific time you want to leave. It has nothing to do with the flightplan per se. They usually send a specific form to notify police and/or customs.
I’m with you Jason and TJ on this. I don’t see how a flight plan is relevant if notice is being given separately to someone (airport, customs, whoever). The only case where a flight plan EOBT could be of interest to customs would be a location where there is no separate notice given to anyone. Usually this applies only to airports with a permanent customs presence, in which case one would likely need to pass customs on the way to the plane anyway.
There are so many logical inconsistencies here that it would take me an hour to type them up.
Just take the case of a delay after takeoff. Almost nobody has a satellite phone, so all the police can do is wait.
If they were smart and pro-active, they would
So, in most cases they just sit and wait. Why doesn’t this cause a civil war? The answer is obvious. Airport police has virtually nothing to do (there is negligible crime) so the Job #1 is to protect jobs. This is for example why the UK police like the GAR for back of beyond places like Alderney… So sitting and waiting is a perfect solution: there is no work involved and it protects jobs. What is there to not like? It’s perfect!
As regards losing one’s PPR, I have never actually seen that. It would cause havoc. The nearest I have seen was the utterly arrogant “flight plan processing office” at Aero EDNY (no idea where they are actually based) who issue a SUSP on any FP whose ETA falls outside the slot which you booked. That effectively kills your FP, but you can’t book another slot because they are all gone, so you have to cancel and re-file using a different service (not Autorouter; in that case I use EuroFPL) which allows the TAS or the ETA to be hacked user-specified 
For departures, a good post is from lionel about every flight being delayed because you can’t start till EOBT. And you are still stuck with no way to verify that the person looking at your docs is the “real one”. You can’t ask to inspect their gun because they have to fill in a form every time it comes out so they don’t like doing it. So I think the Avignon situation was just a cockup followed by a show of force to ram it down the throat of airport management who is really in charge.
There is a lot of old trade union style job demarcation at airports so a lot of stuff is disconnected. But there isn’t much a pilot can do about that.
I would like to see a reference for the assertion that it is the pilot’s duty to verify that he has been police checked. That is unworkable.
Probably the one thing which someone might take home from this episode is that they need to ask the handler about the police arrangements, if they plan to depart before the filed EOBT. In most cases the handler will reply “they are not here today; not interested”. That is how it works at most French airports, for sure.
Clearly that is true in this case, but the pilot is not in a position to know this.
Well… you know how to distinguish between customs and immigration, so obviously you can distinguish between handler employee, security officer and police officer 
Peter wrote:
What is the definitive process for notifying departure time, other than the filed eobt?
Notifying whom? The EOBT on a FPL is just for notifying AIS/ATC, as far as I know. I would never count on or assume it being used to notify anyone else.
If you mean notifying customs then from all the country variations in the above discussion, there is clearly no single or “definitive” process that applies across Europe.
Peter wrote:
There are so many logical inconsistencies here that it would take me an hour to type them up.
No there are not. It is very simple. Send notification to customs. Don’t leave before the time you said you would leave, and if you arrive before the time of arrival you provided, stay at the airplane until such time. Period.
It is to a certain extent a pain to deal with slots, ppr, pnr etc especially if you cumulate them. But that does not constitute an inconsistency. We just need to deal with this.
Peter, it works the same way in the US, Canada etc. The pilot is responsible for complying with customs and immigration issues. I don’t get the big problem to be honest. Comply with your EOBT and you are fine. That includes starting before it. Yes if they show up late and you have to shut down it will be inconvenient. If you think you want to go earlier, let the airport know in case they have to inform immigration.
