IFR trip to EGKA Shoreham (CAS/OCAS and an important lesson learnt)

Well you only pay enroute charges if you access the Eurocontrol airways system I believe. If you stay OCAS you won’t pay and you won’t receive any service.

The CAS situation doesn’t affect your liability to IFR route charges.

What does affect it is whether anybody finds out that you were IFR And they won’t if you don’t tell anybody, and there is no flight plan. I don’t know the current situation, and there are very few people around now flying >2T aircraft low level in the UK, but last I heard, ATC used to report the flight to Eurocontrol and you got a bill. Obviously nobody doing this is going to post about it

I dont get it. Granted I have done a grand total of only a dozen flights, all with SEP, into and out of the UK in my 20-year flying career, last time 1.5 years ago, but I NEVER found any of these issues changing CAS-OCAS.

The last six occasions were international IFR flights with origin or destination in the UK. One of them was into and from Wick with an arrival and departure into a class G ATZ. The other four were in/out of Bristol and Dundee. In all cases either at departure or arrival or enroute there was at least one OCAS segment.

Why did I never experience an issue?

Antonio, reportedly Scottish ATC is much more helpful…

Yes; I can think of 2 reasons:

• Scottish Control does not silently kill off your IFR clearance as soon as you enter Class G
• UK ATC treats foreign pilots differently; they know very well that they would end up with a huge mess to deal with if they did what they do to “natives”

One big thread on this topic and another good one which really p1sses off NATS ATCOs when it appears on UK GA chat sites and they really cannot see anything wrong

Peter wrote:

UK ATC treats foreign pilots differently

That may be it. They once added 80% to my FPL ETE through different routing (Bristol to Cherbourg), but they never made an issue of the CAS/OCAS thing. My IFR FPL was maintained seamlessly through OCAS and back into CAS.

arj1 wrote:

Antonio, reportedly Scottish ATC is much more helpful…

Well that would affect 50% of occasions “only” …I must admit things did get more complex further South

I think yes it would be a combination of non-G-reg (and also not N-reg) together with a foreign accent, which gets you a better service CAS-OCAS-CAS

I also think that sometimes if a “foreigner” enters UK airspace, IFR, say FL065, and gets handed over to London Info (i.e. his IFR clearance has been silently terminated) and shortly afterwards enters the 5500-ft-base CAS (and busts it), no action is taken because everybody knows he will not be around for long, and his home CAA would laugh – given the circumstances – at the UK CAA’s request to prosecute him.

Obviously if this is true, everybody will deny it, but circumstantially I think it must be true that an MOR, if filed, doesn’t usually go very far. I know of cases where absolutely nothing happened to such pilots whereas UK pilots would be 100% busted, no exceptions.

But the above is re busting. Re popup clearances into the LTMA, nobody in light GA gets these.

Peter wrote:

i.e. his IFR clearance has been silently terminated

This really sounds weird. SERA.5015 (c) clearly states, that cancellation of an IFR flight shall only be initiated by PIC. So, yes, this would be indeed very confusing if I was kicked out the system like this. Good to know. Seems like before making any trip to the UK I should post my plans here for some “country-specific” input.

Interesting write-up indeed! Thanks Alpha_Floor for sharing..

UdoR wrote:

This really sounds weird. SERA.5015 (c) clearly states, that cancellation of an IFR flight shall only be initiated by PIC. So, yes, this would be indeed very confusing if I was kicked out the system like this. Good to know. Seems like before making any trip to the UK I should post my plans here for some “country-specific” input.

There is a distinction between having your clearance terminated and your flight rules changed. You are in class G airspace when your clearance is terminated. You can still be IFR since you don’t need a clearance in class G.