VFR Flightplan

[Jens Jensen]

Hi pilots,

one quick question: When filing a flight plan do i have to enter the mandatory reporting pointsat the certain CTRs?

Example: I intend to fly from EDCM to EDDC via reporting point ECHO. How do i transcript that in a flight plan?

Best regards,

Jens

[Martin Hobson]

I dunno about VATSIM but IRL we just file airways/navaids OR intersections along our route - if we bother to file a VFR plan at all. IRL they don't dictate your route but help search & rescue know where to look if you don't arrive at your destination. They are seldom any more precise than needed for this purpose so reporting points likely wouldn't be recorded unless they took you quite a ways out of your way. In any case if you are "reporting" at these points then you are in contact with someone who would know fairly precisely where you were at.

Of course things are different in the VATSIM world but I doubt these flightplans are scrutinized very carefully.

[Andreas Fuchs]

1 hour ago, Martin Hobson said:

IRL we just file airways/navaids OR intersections along our route

That depends on national regulations as to what is permissible in VFR-flightplans.

On 5/5/2020 at 11:22 AM, Jens Jensen said:

I intend to fly from EDCM to EDDC via reporting point ECHO. How do i transcript that in a flight plan?

I guess that you understand German, why not read VATSIM Germany's VFR Manual? https://de.wiki.vatsim-germany.org/Piloten_Trainingsdokumente

[Alistair Thomson]

As a flying instructor flying with a student from Glasgow Airport to the local flying area or on cross-country exercises, we always flew VFR. The rules were different in the open FIR compared to the control zone: in the control zone we flew standard entry-exit lanes between the airfield and the designated reporting points, but outside controlled airspace we simply reported position on request from ATC or as a courtesy when arriving at a significant point en route, updating our time of arrival at our destination. CARPACER was used extensively. :)

So our VFR booking-out procedure, completed on the telephone to ATC, was to specify the exit point from the zone and our destination outside, eg. "Perth via Alexandria" where Perth is a small town on the east coast and Alexandria is a standard exit point from the zone.

In that "Perth" case, ATC often offered a non-standard exit route if traffic permitted, going due North via a valley landmark known as "the Strathblane gap"  from the airfield to the LFA, which was a more direct route. No navaids were mentioned, but visual references were used in position reporting.

[Adam Trzcinski]

On 5/5/2020 at 11:22 AM, Jens Jensen said:

Hi pilots,

one quick question: When filing a flight plan do i have to enter the mandatory reporting pointsat the certain CTRs?

Example: I intend to fly from EDCM to EDDC via reporting point ECHO. How do i transcript that in a flight plan?

Best regards,

Jens

In short, there is the real-world and the vatsim-world way of doing this.

Real World, I would enter waypoints as described in Andreas' link in the VFR manual.

VATSIM World, you can enter the waypoint as "DC-E" (for EDDC-Echo) in the flightplan, as this is what the sectorfile for the airport will have for that reporting point.

[Mats Edvin Aaro]

15 hours ago, Adam Trzcinski said:

VATSIM World, you can enter the waypoint as "DC-E" (for EDDC-Echo) in the flightplan, as this is what the sectorfile for the airport will have for that reporting point.

You totally can, but if I got a plane with that in his route, I wouldn't know anything about what it meant.

The main point is getting your message across and understood by the controllers. Don't try and make it look "cool", we just wanna understand what you want. 😛 So if you write "DEP EDCM VIA RP ECHO, EN ROUTE TO EDDC", that would work just as well.

[Adam Trzcinski]

On 5/20/2020 at 3:10 PM, Mats Edvin Aaro said:

You totally can, but if I got a plane with that in his route, I wouldn't know anything about what it meant.

The main point is getting your message across and understood by the controllers. Don't try and make it look "cool", we just wanna understand what you want. 😛 So if you write "DEP EDCM VIA RP ECHO, EN ROUTE TO EDDC", that would work just as well.

Maybe I should have mentioned that this will only work for Germany, as this is the format used in our sector files.

Your variant of "EDCM VIA RP ECHO, EN ROUTE TO EDDC" I would certainly expect in the remarks fields (Field 18), but certainly not in the route field.
Working ATC I would move this to remarks and replace with "VFR" in route field.