That text looks a little familiar, Routechecker.....
Not a lot to add to what has already been said, but to illustrate the extremes IFPS receives, several years ago, I got a flight plan for a bizjet leaving Helsinki for the Canaries, with a route filed as DCT, and nothing else, plus the IFPS Reroute Accepted comment. A straight reject for several reasons:
- no effort at all had been put into finding a route
- I had no idea what states that flight had permissions to overfly or not
- IFPS is not a free flight planning agency, it is a flight plan distribution service designed primarily to support the flow management in Europe.
I realise that this is a rather extreme example, but it's useful to show the variety of quality in flight plans received in IFPS. The huge majority are pretty good, but with flight plans and associated messages being received from all over the world, there is quite a large number of very poor standard messages coming in to IFPS all the time. As a result, the IFPS staff can get a little jaded from time to time, and crack down on what is reasonable to accept and what is not, so the REJ rate goes up. Tie that in with an on-going exercise to improve the quality of messages submitted to IFPS, and the picture becomes clearer as to why you get REJ messages.
Also, don't forget that it is the responsibility of the aircraft operator to submit a correct flight plan, but that is definitely not easy in European airspace these days, so some assistance from IFPS is usually available.
As Routechecker says, corrections are made on a fairly discretionary basis overall, but all corrections are subject to how busy IFPS is. If there is a large number of invalid messages waiting for correction or rejection, then if the IFPS staff are spending time sorting out each problem, there will be an increasing time penalty unfairly imposed on invalid messages filed later, so fairer to all if IFPS rejects more messages.