Why do VFR flight plans (and flights) not get properly into the ATC system?

In the US, VFR flightplans are routed to FSS and never to ATC. ATC does not have a clue as to where a VFR aircraft is headed. FSS is responsible for SAR and initiates the search 30 minutes after ETA. The purpose of the route is to focus the search area. If a pilot requests flight following, the controller needs to ask the pilot his route information and destination.

Airborne_Again wrote:

A “proper” ICAO VFR flight plan can’t have such things

That might be the theory. (And technically it isn’t true, as the IFR portion is POINT AIRWAY POINT AIRWAY POINT … while the VFR portion is POINT POINT POINT …)

In practice, ANSP seem to process VFR flight plans completely manually, with the help of the ICAO chart. I don’t know about Scandinavia but none of the DACH ICAO charts depict intersections, and neither did the Jepp VFR+GPS charts (except along the FIR boundaries).

I once got a bollocking on LSAZ Info because I used intersections (my revenge was to give location name Lizum for intersection LIZUM — not exactly at the same place but close enough…)

Even though I find it inconvenient, it is still customary not to use intersections in VFR plans — if you look at skyvector, the “world VFR” mode doesn’t depict intersections, only “world Lo” and “world Hi”…

Even though I find it inconvenient, it is still customary not to use intersections in VFR plans

But that is mostly just the Swiss interpretation…

ICAO specifically mentions them as one way to define a flightplan route (and they disallow location names!), and most national regulations, as well as SERA, say the same.

Oh, and these things haven’t been intersections for a long time now, in Europe.

boscomantico wrote:

ICAO specifically mentions them as one way to define a flightplan route (and they disallow location names!), and most national regulations, as well as SERA, say the same.

Can you quote the actual regulation, please?

boscomantico wrote:

Oh, and these things haven’t been intersections for a long time now, in Europe.

And how do you call “these things”?

Designated Points sounds so clunky…

5LNC even more so

tomjnx wrote:

And technically it isn’t true, as the IFR portion is POINT AIRWAY POINT AIRWAY POINT … while the VFR portion is POINT POINT POINT …

Technically it is true. Nothing prevents you from using airway designators in VFR flight plans although it is a bit odd. “POINT POINT POINT” is not legal – it should be “POINT DCT POINT DCT POINT”. (Swedish ARO phoned me once about this. Although they understood what I meant, the computer rejected the flight plan so they had to fix it manually.)

For some reason you may omit the DCT between two unnamed points — i.e. lat-long or bearing-distance points.

Tom,

already quoted and discussed in the past..see here.

Airborne_Again wrote:

For some reason you may omit the DCT between two unnamed points — i.e. lat-long or bearing-distance points.

IIRC the german DFS don’t like DCT in VFR flight plans, and they phone you to tell you about it. But it has been a while that I have filed VFR through DFS so I am not sure anymore.

I am curious as to why ATC would care about a VFR flightplan. In the US, it is merely information used for SAR. The route in the flightplan does not need to be followed, there is no concept of a clearance for the route. We would just open or activate the flightplan with the FSS on departure and close it on arrival. If overdue by more than 30 minutes, FSS would initiate a SAR.

VFR FPs have certain functions in Europe:

• mandatory to cross most borders
• optional but possibly useful for SAR
• in a few cases, ATC want you on specific routes (historically e.g. Greece wanted you on IFR routes e.g. A14)
• they keep a lot of people in jobs, working out the addressing, picking holes in the details and making phone calls