Right. On an IFR flight through Germany you will maybe talk to ATC when they give you a shortcut, like maybe once every 20 minutes or, if you don’t get any “Directs” no talking at all until you get the descent and approach clearance.
“Golf Romeo Charlie, proceed direct (waypoint)”
“Golf Romeo Charlie, direct (waypoint)”
Does that qualify as chatter?
On an IFR flight through Germany you will maybe talk to ATC when they give you a shortcut, like maybe once every 20 minutes
Yes. Someone was complaining about the boredom of IFR flights on PPL/IR the other day.
Eurocontrol IFR doesn’t need much talking when enroute but you do need to listen because, most of the time, you can’t be really sure you aren’t going to get called.
The one time you can be sure you won’t get called is on a handover to the next unit, and presumably that is why MH370 went off the air at that point.
Possibly what some people don’t like is that one does need a reasonable level of radio competence – because everybody else up there is very current. There are some exceptions (on the way back from Dresden the other day the London Control ATCO got fed up with a % of the jets simply not listening, and he told everybody to listen properly because he is too busy to call everybody twice) but they are very rare. You simply do not hear any of the traditional PPL poor radio work. ATC give you a max of a few seconds to respond and if you don’t they call you again. I guess some people find this scary because the only way to deal with it is to be fairly current, have an autopilot and use it 100%, and pay attention. But the amount of talking you do is very small.
As regards boredom, that’s very much dependent on who you are flying with and on the scenery down below. If you have nice passenger(s) then any flight is great, and once at the Alps or the Pyrenees, or south of there, the scenery ranges from pretty good to awesome. To/from the UK, I usually wish for Mach 2 for the first few hundred nm 
The one time you can be sure you won’t get called is on a handover to the next unit, and presumably that is why MH370 went off the air at that point.
You frequently get called if you are late checking in or have I misunderstood.
You frequently get called if you are late checking in or have I misunderstood.
I believe you have 2 minutes, in theory. I don’t have a reference for this.
Eurocontrol IFR doesn’t need much talking when enroute but you do need to listen because, most of the time, you can’t be really sure you aren’t going to get called.
I can’t comment on Eurocontrol ATC but listening to the radio is a distraction from flying, which is what I enjoy. Flying from an airport with 600 movements daily, often to similar airports, I get plenty of practice on the radio, but en route I prefer to avoid the ‘dog listening for name to be called’ syndrome – so I don’t remain in radio contact with ATC. I also prefer to land anywhere I like along a route that I plan roughly beforehand, but don’t notify anybody of before departure. I don’t file flight plans. Increasingly I find that’s the kind of flying I like… but it’s not possible everywhere, you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do in most of Europe, and to each his own.
The USA supports VFR to 17999ft which means that in any decent wx you can just fly VFR and potentially talk to nobody.
It’s a great system but relies on national (centralised) airspace design and public funding
Europe has turned airspace design into a job creation scheme (a fight between the military and the civilian turf warriors) and the only way you can do that here, generally speaking, is when flying very low, which could mean under 1000ft AGL in some countries. In the UK you can do it over large areas too.
