Hello!

Significant points with designators can only be used in the route field because they are clearly defined in AIP ENR 4.x.

Although many four-letter airfield designators are defined in AIP AD, there are a huge number of these in many countries which are NOT defined in the AIP (except the location decode section). The positions of them are simply undefined, therefore any recipient of the flightplan performing machine reading of the plan (this is the critical part) would fail if such a designator were used.

As somebody else mentioned, the primary recipient of flightplans in Europe in Eurocontrol. If you attempt to put an airfield ICAO identifier in your route plan in such a flightplan, it will rightly be rejected.

Tim, how often have you tried putting an airport ID in the route field of a flight plan? I have done it myself many times (VFR mainly but also IFR). They were all flightplans addresssed to Eurocontrol. None of them has been rejected for this reason yet.

Have you talked to an actual live controller about this? I have, several times to different controllers (wherever the opportunity arose in the past 1-2 years). None of them have told me otherwise. In fact, they all confirmed that they prefer published names over coordinates.

-- Chris.

Tim, how often have you tried putting an airport ID in the route field of a flight plan? I have done it myself many times (VFR mainly but also IFR). They were all flightplans addresssed to Eurocontrol. None of them has been rejected for this reason yet.

I did that before posting my previous message. The flight plan was rejected.

Very interesting indeed. I tried to access international flightplans of mine from last year off the homebriefing server but they weren't accessible anymore. However, the next one I file I'll post here just to prove that I wasn't dreaming. The only difference I can see is that mine didn't have the DCT acronym inserted in the route section. But I think it's doubtful this would make a difference.

-- Chris.

You must use DCT or a route designator for each segment of the route (except when you use geographical coordinates), otherwise the flight plan will again be rejected.

The added difficulty of parsing a route description without DCT would be negligible. (At least as long as it is impossible for an ATS route and a significant point to have the same designator.)