Filing Flight Plans out of your Pocket

Filing Flightplans

On a recent business trip to Cannes with a Piper Archer II, we had the opportunity to shortly visit the great island of Corsica just off the coast of France. We just visited Verona and had a business appointment in Cannes, but could not fly easily through the North of Italy due to thunderstorms there. So we decided to fly first to Elba and after that, we visited Corsica before flying over the sea to Cannes. As one of the great and often forgotten aerodromes of the island, Propriano has one paved runway, partly overgrown by grass with air-to-air communications only. The runway ends right at the beach.

approach

When we landed there we met 2 Swiss pilots sitting at the local restaurant in the shade with thick Bottlang manuals and charts, preparing for their next flight out. They were camping out right at this desolated aerodrome and wondered how to file and activate their flight plan, as nobody seemed to be there at the aerodrome at that time.

friends

Sitting in the shade with one of our new Swiss friends. 

I offered my help and suggested to file the flight plan for them using my iPhone and the AeroPlus Flightplan Filing app.

Later that day we visited the beach for a swim. The beach can be accessed by a path alongside the runway. It is amazing they would just let you walk along the runway towards the beach. In Holland, this would not be allowed.

After returning back from the beach, we filed our own flight plan to Cannes and since nobody was there to activate our flight plan for us, we send ourselves the departure AFTN message from the iPhone app and took off.

Propriano

Once in the air and en route, we contacted ATC area controllers at the nearby larger airport and they already had received our flight plan! They informed us that it was already activated. We were all set to fly to Cannes.

During this whole trip, I used nothing else but the iPad and iPhone for flight plan filing, checking the current and forecasted aviation weather and for preparing the flight. It feels great to have all this information available at disposal on your iPhone or iPad at any location and not to be dependent anymore on local briefing rooms and writing out flight plan forms by hand.

pilatus

The latest version of the app is smart when filing VFR. The AeroPlus Flightplan App automatically calculates the estimated en route time (EET) and adds the EET to the FIR boundaries in the flight plan for you with the proper time estimation. When filing IFR, the app suggests valid Eurocontrol routes using our smart IFR routing engine. Check out this app in the Apple Appstore.