I had another FPL rejected by Austrian authorities. Was from Salzburg westwards outbound via their VFR points. Looked ok to me, but I got this message:

FPL NOT ACCEPTED.
ADVISE BORDER POINTS AND CORRECT ROUTING.

I notice that SD doesn't put border crossing points in, but I've always been used to doing this when filing manual FPL's. So what's the story .. is SD supposed to produce a usable FPL when crossing country boundaries, or is it just a template which always has to be manually modified ? Obviously one can always put a waypoint on the boundary somewhere but it always to appear as coordinates, which seems to be disliked by several authorities.

(weirdly after calling the Vienna ATS, the lady who answered said the FPL looked ok, and accepted it without me modifiying it).

Yeah, I also file manually via Homebriefing.com. SD's way of defining border crossing points doesn't work. You need to file using the designated points on the chart. But the /EET field is still required.

-- Chris.

There is no international standard for this, so SkyDemon does the best it can and normally it's fine. If a country requires you to use a named point or VRP when you cross its border, you must ensure you comply with that with your routing. As the pilot, it's your responsibility to do so.

We could do a bunch of work to make SkyDemon enforce it, but we'd need to encode these country-specific rules into SkyDemon and (much more onerous) maintain them going forward, when (in our experience) they are subject to change and not really published.

For me the 'generic' SD version has been accepted unaltered for these international crossings :

Germany --> France
France --> Jersey
Jersey --> France
France --> Spain
Spain --> France
France --> Italy
Italy --> Croatia

So far only Austria and Slovenia were fussy about the crossing point names before accepting a plan.

Concerning use of the (18)/EET FIS  , that's what I've always used anyway with manual plans, the only addition is to add RMK's specifiying the names of crossing points into the FIS areas. Never had any plan rejected like that. Therefore it seems that the SD generic is going to be OK most of the time if one adds the crossing point names as RMK. 

Why not do it this way, which ought to make everyone happy:

If you are crossing the border within, say, 0.25 miles of a defined border crossing point you insert this point kn the flightplan. If no such point exists close by just use the coordinates.

-- Chris.

If you cross at a defined point with an identifier, SkyDemon WILL include that point in the flightplan of course.

Yes, the flightplan is presented in a textual form where most fields can be modified by the pilot before submission.

SkyDemon includes the ETA at all FIRs as the ICAO standard requires. I'm not aware of any standard that requires the ETA at any other points to be put into item 18. If we did include such points, would they essentially duplicate the ones already there for the FIRs? Is there any documentation from any country to support the suggestion that we should add them to item 18?