Flying in the USA vs. Europe

Andrew,

What is involved in getting an IFR clearance in Europe?
Are "GPS direct" as common as they are here?

You'll be sorry you asked ;-)

Getting directs is very common. Filing directs is extremely uncommon.

Your flight plan has to be accepted by Eurocontrol's Central Flight
Management Unit CFMU. In order to be accepted by their computer, it has
to adhere to all route restrictions applicable on that day. It can be
extremely convoluted to find an acceptable route on a longer flight, but
it is quite easy on shorter flights. Mostly, directs are not allowed
between points farther apart than 40 or 50 nm. Also, some airports
and/or routes have flow restrictions and require slots. Then there's
enroute user fees for any aircraft with an MTOW of 2 metric tons or
greater.

There is only one prohibitively expensive flight planning software
taking all the restrictions (remember, they are time dependent) into
account while generating automatic routes - and a website run by flight
simulator enthusiasts that generates mostly valid flightplans for free
(ah, the irony!). With a little tweaking, those work great.

The acceptable flight plans can be very complex and convoluted, however,
you'll never fly them as filed and often get directs. The fact that each
EU country still insists on having their own ATC doesn't help much,
either.

CFMU has a website where you can test if your flight plan conforms to
the CMFU rules in advance. Very helpful. If it gets accepted there,
it'll work.

You have to file an hour in advance.

Other than that, it's easy.

However, many countries in Europe have more peculiarities: Some have no
IFR approaches in Class G airspace, some don't allow IAPs without an
official observer present at the field. This makes the number of fields
with IAPs much smaller than in the US.

The IR is still very useful since the weather isn't that great in
central Europe.

--
Thomas Borchert (EDDH)