Are "Popups" A Hassle?

Mike Teague wrote:

Does ATC reserve airspace for an un-activated IFR flightplan? or not until
you call for clearance?

No airspace is reserved until a clearance is issued.

I know one pilot who would say a pop-up was a hassle:-))

A few years back I was IFR from 3BS to OSH about two weeks before the
fly-in. Most of Michigan was socked in and I mean right down to ILS
minimums and controllers were busier than the proverbial one arm paper
hanger with an itch.

I was just barely on top, nearing the eastern shoreline of Lake
Michigan and talking to Minneapolis Center. A King Air out of an
airport NE of Traverse City "popped up" on frequency and called center
4 or 5 times. He tried to file and Center curtly told him to come
back after calling FSS and filing a pop-up.

As I said, Michigan was socked in. This guy had to have climbed up
through at least 5,000 feet of weather where you were lucky to see
your own wing tips and you could hear the tension in his voice.

Some where between 5 and 10 minutes later he came back on frequency
and told center he could not raise FSS from his altitude. (maybe he
really was scud running, but most of the state had ceilings well less
than 500 feet. The southern half was lucky to have 200 and people
were going missed on ILSs. That would *certainly* account for the
tension in his voice) At any rate that time center took the time to
let him file and gave him a clearance.

Roger Halstead (K8RI & ARRL life member)
(N833R, S# CD-2 Worlds oldest Debonair)
www.rogerhalstead.com

"Robert M. Gary" wrote in message
oups.com...

Steve, Could it be a lost comm issue? Perhaps controllers don't want
to issue IFR clearances with clearance limits that are not airports?
I'm still not sure why it would be different for VFR-on-top though.



You'd have to ask a controller that's unwilling to issue such a clearance.
I am not one of them.

"Mike Teague" wrote in message
...

Does ATC reserve airspace for an un-activated IFR flightplan?


No.

On 26 Oct 2005 13:12:40 -0700, wrote:

John R. Copeland wrote:
"Everett M. Greene" wrote in message ...
Are you certain about that? It sounds high by several orders
of magnitude. Every airplane in the world would have to make
about a hundred flights per day to get to a million flight
plans per day.

Within the U.S., the number of IFR airborne aircraft at any moment
peaks up to between 4000 and 5000 on most days now.
Overnight minimums typically get down to around 1000 at a time.
http://flightaware.com/analysis/graphs/total.rvt
I won't try to extrapolate that to a total daily count, though.

Also keep in mind that MANY flight plans are filed that are never
flown, but the system still has to keep track of.

I know locally there's a company that flies checks each morning.

Really?

I thought all the check flying guys were put out of business by the
new banking regulations requiring images.



In
just one sector at the local center they have 7 or 8 automatically
generated flight plans each morning, going in and out of a set of small
airports. Those flight plans only get activated if the weather is IFR,
otherwise the company pilots fly VFR and the flightplans just timeout.
There's another company that has quit a few of their routes, but has
not cancelled their automatically generating flight plans for those
routes each morning. They're in the same sector mentioned above. The
facility has been after the company to stop the flight plans, but they
haven't done anything about it yet.

That's 10-11 flight plans per morning (never mind the rest of the
day...), in ONE single sector, that are processed by the system but not
included in the daily traffic count. It all adds up pretty quickly.

wrote in message ...
On 26 Oct 2005 13:12:40 -0700, wrote:

I know locally there's a company that flies checks each morning.

Really?

I thought all the check flying guys were put out of business by the
new banking regulations requiring images.


Not out of business yet, but definitely in decline.
Some are trying to diversify into same-day package delivery.