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2 Answers

Airborne pickup of a filed IFR clearance.

Asked by: 854 views , ,
General Aviation, Instrument Rating

Scenario: I want to depart VFR and arrive IFR while expecting a flight in VMC. The airport I’m arriving has some unique terrain and Class B issues that make the IFR arrival beneficial. I am IFR rated, equipped, and current. 

If I file online from a VOR on the route, how do I know the frequency for pickup? Should I make my call at the VOR? Or a few minutes before arriving at it?

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2 Answers

  1. Best Answer


    John D Collins on Jan 05, 2024

    A good question. The FAA has 22 ATTCC centers. You file flight plans with only one of them. Until you receive a clearance, only the center you filed with has access to your flight plan. The center boundaries shown on the IFR Low Enroute maps don’t describe which center is responsible for filing a flight plan at a specific airport or area, particularly when within roughly 50 NM of the charted center boundaries. Centers make deals with each other which divide up the airspace on both sides of the charted boundaries and are called surface boundaries. If a flight plan is transmitted to the wrong center, that center will reject the flight plan and when you get to the VOR, there won’t be a flight plan on file in their system. Not all filing systems take the actual surface boundaries into account when routing flight plans to the center, mainly when filing flight plans that originate at a point other than an airport, such as a VOR or waypoint.

    I recommend you file from an airport near the VOR where you intend to pickup your IFR clearance. That pretty much assures that your flight plan will be in the system and the airport departure control frequency can be used to get your clearance. I would include the VOR in the route and might add a remark such as Depart VFR, Pickup IFR near ABC VOR.

    Filing with ForeFlight does respect the surface boundaries and you can use a named waypoint, latitude-longitude, or fix-radial-distance as the departure point, so it will get filed with the appropriate center. There is a bug in ForeFlight mobile that treats a 3 letter ICAO VOR identifier when used as the departure point as a 3 letter IATA airport ID and converts it to an ICAO 4 character airport ID, which may end up designating an airport half way around the world. The web version of ForeFlight does not do this conversion. So for this reason, I don’t recommend filing with a VOR identifier as the pickup point. You can file a few miles from a VOR such as ABC090002 which would be 2 NM east of ABC VOR, and that will work. Hopefully this will eventually get fixed. Usually the nearest airport departure control frequency can be used to pickup the clearance, but if you are within 50 NM of a charted center boundary and you contact ATC and they can’t find your flight plan, try the adjacent center, as they may have it.

    Note, last I checked, other flight plan filing systems don’t use the surface center boundaries and they may end up with flight plans that are rejected by the centers, in which case, your flight plan is effectively not on file.

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  2. Mark Kolber on Jan 07, 2024

    I agree with John. And I have heard controllers say that the best way is to always file from an airport, not some random enroute navaid, fix, or waypoint. It makes it easier for the pilot (your question) and pretty much guarantees the right facility will have it.

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