Originally Posted by
LGWClosedAgain
One for the pilots/flight planners. How does the final flight plan that is filed with UK ATC get to all the area control centres on route? For example, say LHR-SIN, how does each ACC know what the plan is? I can’t imagine it’s individually submitted to every single FIR the flight is due to pass though.
If I’m not mistake, Russia charges a hefty fee to flyover Siberia and China only allows commercial flights on a number of the very limited airways. So does each FIR have to approve the route before it’s accepted?
Within participating states (basically all of Europe, including Iceland) there is something known as IFPS, the Integrated Flight Plan Processing System. Any flight that routes in this airspace only needs to be sent to this one addressee, and IFPS will disseminate it to the appropriate ACCs.
So for the portion of an LHR-SIN flight that is inside the IFPS zone, that’s simple, but yes, for the portion outside the IFPS zone, it needs to be addressed to individual ACCs (or more accurately FIRs - Flight Information Regions, some FIRs might have more than one ACC within it, but the ANSP is responsible for ensuring the dissemination within FIRs).
I’m no expert, so imagine some areas/states might have similar arrangements to IFPS (Australia I think?), where one address is used for a flight plan processing system and that system then further cascades the flight plan out as appropriate.