Olympic Aispace Restrictions.

[Brian Hope]

The Olympic Airspace Restrictions start at midnight (local) tonight (13th July) and it is incumbent on us all to ensure that recreational GA behaves appropriately throughout the period. If you or anybody you know is unsure of the procedures required to operate legally in the affected areas, primarily in the South of England, please check out the SAFETY - OLYMPICS pages on this website. There are links to the CAA published information plus a number of articles that have appeared in Light Aviation in recent months explaining in layman's terms your responsibilities. Be safe.

[FlyOnTrack]

Early feedback from ATLAS this morning:

"Thanks for everyone's help so far - Atlas is operating below capacity - obviously due to the weather.

some flight plans being rejected so please double check before sending.

important not to arrive / inital call Atlas outside the "30 minute either side of planned departure" please as that causes issues

if you're using a circuit exemption don't forget to use the allocated airfield squawk from Atlas rather than 7000 etc"

On the 30 minute thing, if you forget that flight plan departure times are taken as UTC, you could easily take off an hour early by mistake.

[John Dean]

I know it's early days yet but I have been very disappointed at the response times from Atlas in issuing their acceptance of flight plans.

I filed two plans (there and back) at 8:15pm last night and it was 11:11pm before I got a response. Almost three hours is a very long time although, of course, it didn't matter as the EOBT was 10:30am this morning. Those flights had to be cancelled as the destination had closed its runway due to waterlogging.

Another two plans were submitted at 10:15am this morning for a departure at 12:30pm but it was 12:15 before confirmation came through. Hardly enough time to get airborne before EOBT.

All this whilst Atlas must have been under no stress because of the poor weather in the restricted area.

I hope things improve.

[Brian Hope]

Have to agree with John, we are at the same strip and I and another friend of ours had the same problems, he getting confirmation only five minutes before EOBT, and then only after phoning Atlas. We are fortunate to have a landline and broadband at the strip so we could at least keep up to speed and easily comunicate with the Atlas and AFPEx systems, had we been reliant solely on a mobile it would have been hopeless. As it happened the weather clamped (much worse than forecast) and we couldn't go anyway but if it had been a good flying day I'm sure the system would have completely failed.
Day two and it is looking better - I filed out and back flight plans to go to Dunkeswell at about 6:15 for a 9:00 departure and got the OK on my outbound within half an hour. Still no news on the return though. I will go and hope for the best!

[Brian Hope]

Well I got there and back! Thanks Devon Strut for a great event, pleased the second day turned out so much better with a pretty good turnout of aircraft. I didn't get my return approval until 1150, that's five and a half hours after I filed the flight plan. As I was going to Dunkeswell I wasn't too worried - plenty of facilities there to sort out a new flight plan or whatever, but if I had been going to a small airstrip with no facilities I would much have preferred to have known that my return plan had been accepted before I had departed from home base. This lengthy delay in dealing with flight plan approvals is a problem that needs sorting out.
The actual radio side of things worked great, both ways. Oh and today I used Skydemon Light to file the plans and that worked great too. Just the admin to sort out then.

[Brian Hope]

Expecting a Press release from NATS shortly to confirm that extra resources are being put into place immediately to resolve the delays in responding to flight plans. More news as we get it.

[John Dean]

Things appear to be getting much better.

I filed two flight plans yesterday evening at 18:30 for today and had acceptance for both by 18:50. Flights went according to plan, I called Atlas on 123.225 climbing out from the airstrip sqawking 7000 and they came back almost instantaneously asking for my clearance number. After a very short pause I was told the number had been verified and I was accepted to operate in R112 and given a squawk code. Another short pause and I was transferred to a discrete frequency, 119.xxx. Called that frequency with my call sign and was instructed to continue on track and call destination in sight.

All very slick and professional causing no stress on my part. Well done "Atlas".

[Jeremy Liber]

John

That sounds promising.

I am likely to file a flight plan on Sunday evening for Blackbushe. When you received your authorization number did it simply come through as text in an e-mail message on the e-mail address that you noted in the flight plan? If not, in what form did you get it?

Regards

Jeremy

[John Dean]

Jeremy,

The authorisation number came through as an AFPEx message and also as an SMS to my mobile phone.

[FlyOnTrack]

Things are hopefully going to settle down a bit now, various bits of work have been done behind the scenes to fine tune out the problems like engaged phones experienced at first. Here's a Q&A to help resolve some of the issues discussed in the last few days. Anyone flying using R112 from/to a foreign field, there is advice on how they need the routings and estimates coded for the UK boundary to let their system know it is a foreign flight.
http://www.tinyurl.com/r112qanda1

[Mike Millar]

I note that Atlas Control FAQ 15 states that an EET for an FIR boundary must contain the location of the crossing point in Item 18, example EET/lat,long. This is contrary to the advice of CAP 694 and is presumably covered by the accompanying FAQ statement that the system used by Atlas Control does not accept all the options detailed in CAP 694. Other advice in the helpful articles in Light Aviation for ZZZZ departure and arrival airfields has also indicated that DEP/ and DEST/ require lat,long locations as well as name, another departure from CAP 694. Is this lat/long thing purely a requirement for Atlas Control? I have recently been putting DEP/NAME LATLONG in normal flight plans to and from France, when presumably only the name of the airfield is required, as stated in CAP 694.

It seems little wonder that there have been so many problems with Atlas flight plans given the departures from CAP 694, presumably for security reasons? A friend of mine has been so intimidated by the process that he cancelled a flight to join the Fournier tour of Spain this week, a sad reflection of the arcane flight planning system that has been imposed on us in UK. AFPex staff have now been instructed not to accept verbal flight plans as a last resort. I find EUROFPL a far simpler and more friendly system than AFPex. It works on an iphone as well. I did advise my friend that in extremis he could call the French flightplan number and file the fpl verbally with the nice French lady.

[Brian Hope]

Hi Mike, it is very unfortunate if your friend, or anybody else, is not going to fly simply because of the requirement to file a flight plan. I agree AFPEx is far from perfect, and the departure from the usual system of filling in the plan is unfortunate because it is more complex. However, your friend could still register with SkyDemon, which creates a flight plan and sends it for you, and file down to Lydd say, which is out of the zone, and then file an ordinary flight plan (actually they would probably do it for him) to his onward destination in France. (The free SkyDemon system can only be used for UK destinations).
Alternatively he could get somebody who knows the AFPEx system to file the flight plan on his behalf, a local airfield perhaps.
At Farthing Corner we decided we were not going to allow the restrictions to spoil our flying and last Saturday four of the eight resident aircraft headed off to Sandown IOW for the day. One of them had no transponder and was escorted as per the requirements. It was a beautiful day but the Atlas frequency was pretty quiet both out and back, in fact it has been every time I have flown since R112 started. That's a pity because once you have mastered the flight planning, or got a mate to do it for you, the actual flying requirements are straightforward and the controllers are very helpful and efficient.

[Rob Swain]

I'm glad I'm nowhere near the major affected areas (if one ignores the zillions of football grounds that have been included) and have no intentions of going anywhere near any of them, but I did notice that London Information was almost dead on saturday when one would have expected it to be really busy on a nice weekend after loads of awful weather. Looks like a lot of people have hung up their flying goggles for the duration.

One wonders (and worries) what this is going to do for flying club revenues in and near the main affected areas.

When I put my pessimist and paranoid hats on I do wonder if the successful imposition of Atlas and the Olympic airspace restrictions could be a prelude to a huge permanent expansion of CAS in the southern half of the country. In some ways one hopes that the initial Atlas shambles continues as a demonstration of how un-workable an idea this is, although since when has experience ever got in the way of a political decision!

...once you have mastered the flight planning...

Good luck with that: I've never managed to log a flight plan on AFPOx in less that 2 hours and without at least one phone call, normally more.
I've had two people demonstrate how easy it is - both times the thing crashed.
I've attended official lectures on how to use it: these were typified by comments like "I know this feature isn't vey good, but", "You'd think you can put this here - but you can't" and "Once you get the hang of it you'll get to know what to put in field xx".
It's an utterly farcical piece of User Interface design that would fail if presented by a GCSE IT student.

[johnmichie]

Before the birth of Atlas I put flight plans in via the German AIS. Registration is free and all the addressing is done for you, you even get an SMS message that all is well. It absolutely puts Afpex to shame.

I didn't want to risk it not coping with R112 so have been using Sky Demon since the restrictions and this has performed flawlessly. Again, puts Afpex to shame.

John

[Mike Millar]

I think my friend's flight planning difficulties were also due to lack of preparedness. He hasn't done it much by himself and has always got away with filing over the phone before. It's probably the most difficult part of flying out of England (or in the Olympic zone!) and I had to do a quite lot of advance reading and preparation before I got the hang of it, AFpox or otherwise, and I've got a CPL! I did direct him to Skydemon and EuroFPL, which I think is the system Sykdemon uses - so much easier than AFpox.

I think a lot of people have been put off flying at all by R112. Flying back from Compton on Sunday afternoon, Farnborough radar was so quite that I had to call them to check that I hadn't had radio failure! He said it was unusually quiet, usually the controller is talking continuously.

Does anyone have an an answer to my original question - for normal flight plans with a ZZZZ DEP or DEST, should the lat and long be included in the comment in Item 18? Or is that just for ATLAS flightplans. I trialed Skydemon and it included the lat and long for a pre Olymics flight to France but CAP 694 doesn't say anything about it, only the name of the aerodrome is asked for. No harm in including it though I suppose. It might save them time in an emergency, which I think is all the VFR flight plan is for.

Thanks

Mike