"Kobra" wrote in message
. ..
Fellow Aviators,

I was flying on Tuesday from N14 in NJ to Baltimore-Washington Airport. I
was going IFR because of the Washington ADIZ.

When I called McGuire Approach for my clearance I was given the route and
all information except my release, void and advise times. They said to
call back in 10 minutes for release.

Ok...so I taxi down to the runway, do my run-up and pre-takeoff checks and
wait the remaining time twiddling my thumbs for the full 10 minutes (hobbs
running the whole time of course). I call in and they tell me that there
will be another delay and to call back in 10 more minutes.

I could have shut the engine down and waited, but I was also on a tight
schedule as I had to be back to work at 3:00 pm and the current time was
about 10:45 am.

I said to my passenger, "we're gonna take off VFR and fly the filed route
at 4,500 feet and then request opening the IFR flight plan in the air.
After I said this I thought to myself, I bet this move will tick-off the
controller and he'll end up giving me some random circuitous vectors just
to show me who's boss.

Sure enough as soon as I got leveled off on the first airway (V16) I
called approach and requested my IFR flight plan be activated. The
response was, "...I can't activate you're flight plan unless you fly 5
miles northeast..." Of course I was headed southwest. I turned around and
flew about 8 miles before I again asked for my plan to be opened. I was
told to standby and after another 2 minutes finally got my plan activated.

Now, my question is: If I wasn't in his airspace (which I think I was)
couldn't he have just told me to continue and contact Atlantic City
approach to open my plan? Do you think I was being "paid back" for
circumventing ATC's authority?

I doubt it. It's certainly not unheard of for a ****ed off ATCer to issue
penalty vectors, but it doesn't happen that often. Had he wanted to
penalize you it would have been much easier just to tell you unable to your
pop-up and go **** off. Some DOD approach controls don't have the same
hand-off capability as FAA facilities so you may have been too close to the
edge of his airspace to get your flight plan going and manually coordinate
with the next facility. It also doesn't take too much traffic before DOD
facilities are overloaded.