Only customs, no immigration.
There is also rather little there in the immediate surroundings.
In France “Police” = Immigration.
Feel free to try it.
Feel free to try it.
@boscomantico I know you are not going to do anything to help me (a 20+ year old history there, observed and commented on by many, for reasons which remain a mystery to me, other than perhaps I started doing trip writeups back then) but in the spirit of helping the many others here, why not post something informative ?
According to you, this is yet another French airport which has a misleading AIP. And no NOTAM.
You also posted you will not contribute to our airport database, but anyway nobody else has either, on LFSP. So given that you have obviously been there, why not tell?
This is quite serious stuff, because getting picked up and fined by French police is not going to be fun, especially if one can’t speak French.
From here it appears that LFSP may be another case of bogus published data.
On the airport website (yes a website, not AIP or anything) here it has a particular remark about customs, specifically re Switzerland Suisse : Pour partir à destination de la suisse ou pour arriver de la suisse, notre aérodrome est douanier. Vous devez vous annoncer à la douane française en remplissant et envoyant ce formulaire à l’adresse indiquée dans celui-ci avec un préavis de 12 Heures.
Google translation: To leave for Switzerland or to arrive from Switzerland, our airfield is customs-free. You must register with French customs by completing and sending this form to the address indicated therein with 12 hours’ notice.
Gramatically, this is BS.
The form seems just a normal Customs declaration.
I emailed the customs email address in the AIP to ask, in English and French.
Google translate is wrong. The French version means it’s a customs field.
The AIP states it has both Customs and Immigration, so that’s good so far 
The airport website does not state there is NO immigration.
I see no way to email the club there, which would be really strange…
why not post something informative ?
Why discuss things again and again which have clearly been „established“? Just to create more discussion? One last time: The legal document concerning French border crossing points, relevant for non-Schengen flights, is here. No Pontarlier. The mentioning of the word „Police“ in the AIP (which as we know there is also at Lognes for example) is irrelevant, and merely a testament to the poor quality of the „Customs“ information in the AD section of the French AIP.
Standard pilot briefing is not supposed to involve digging out obscure EU or (in this case) even more obscure national laws.
All that has been “established” is that the system doesn’t work properly, which is what this thread is about.
A funny thing is that OpenFly lists Pontarlier to Shoreham as one of its most frequent charter routes.🙂
