Good flight planning is important, but it is probably one of the most dull parts of flying. Well, actually that would be filling in the aircraft journal after flight. I always seem to lose that tiny little piece of paper on which I wrote down all the flight times. In addition, filing a flight plan for your (partially) controlled or your international flight within Europe is also one of those things that needs to be done, but you’d rather skip that.
VFR addressing
VFR addressing can be a huge pain for either you as a pilot or for your ARO office. In some countries like e.g. the UK, you as a pilot are responsible for addressing your flightplan correctly, while in other countries, the ARO office takes responsibility for this. Finding the correct addressing parameters for your flight is not easy. For full IFR flights, Eurocontrol will take care of the flight plan addressing part, but for VFR addressing we are left to the mercy of the national AIP rules. Nobody wants to study the GEN 1.11 section of the AIP of every country you fly into. And I agree with you. For those that have never even seen that part of the AIP, don’t bother, we’re here to take that pain of the addressing away from you.
Smart automated VFR addressing
AeroPlus has made a unique and smart addressing engine for all your VFR (and mixed VFR/IFR) flight plans. Just fill in the departure and destination, enter the route and we’ll figure out the correct addressing for you. Flying in France? No problem at all, we know the way. Flying across the border? We’ll make sure your flight plan arrives at the correct stations along the route. How we’ve done that? Part of that is hard to explain but I’ll take a shot at explaining it to you.
How we do it
There are different kinds of stations that need to receive your flight plan along the route. The aerodromes of departure and destination are the most common ones, but there are loads of other stations that need to know the fact that you are in the air. Lets take a nice example where we depart from the Aerodrome of Biggin Hill and fly to Calais in France. The route will be via the Dover VOR (DVR) and then to Koksijde (KOK VOR) along the beautiful coast down to Calais. This particular flight will raise a few eyebrows, but being VFR, we really would like to fly down the Belgian coast down to France to see the dunes of Dunkirk. You will fly through 3 different FIR’s and you’ll cross a few controlled areas. Conventional addressing systems will file the flight plan and address it to Biggin Hill and Calais and the FIR’s in which these airports are situated. If we have a good addressing system, also the FIR’s we fly through will be addressed.
AeroPlus will do much more than that. Not only will we address all the correct airports, area’s, FIR’s and offices along your route, we’ll also automatically calculate the EET to all the FIR boundaries for you. And if that is not enough, we’ll also calculate the EET for your flight based on the climb and descent gradient and the winds aloft! Finally, when you fly partially at night, other stations might have to be addressed as well, so we also look at your departure time, the time you pass en route stations and areas and your arrival time. In case only part of the flight plan is VFR, the AeroPlus addressing engine can figure this part out as well.
VFR addressing engine calculating the EET values for FIR boundary crossings and total flight.
ARO office functionality
As an ARO office, you might be responsible for a specific FIR or area. When using the AeroPlus software you can take control of your area of responsibility and provide your pilots with an integrated briefing solution and even automate the flight plan approval and addressing on busy weekend days when low on staff.
Sample configuration of how to take control of a specific FIR or area.
If as in this example (purely for illustrative purposes) you would be responsible for the EHAA FIR, you can configure the AeroPlus software to exclude the military fields or sub-regions.
Now let’s assume a VFR flight from Rotterdam (EHRD) to Calais (LFAC) and you are as ARO responsible for the VFR addressing of this flight.
AeroPlus VFR addressing engine for a flight from Rotterdam to Lille assuming ARO responsibility.
If you would not be responsible for the addressing of this specific flight, then this VFR flight plan would only be addressed to the responsible ARO Office as specified in the AIP, thus to EHRDZPZX.
