Makosa:
If you work by the book, you HAVE to say "Airline 123 bonjour, maintain FL360, route ATN, CLM".
Thanks for the confirmation! I hope they change this requirement soon.
Ziggy:
In France to my surprise, almost every time, I found 5 minutes later that he meant for me to maintain that heading without specifically telling me to.
Yep, I've noticed that as well!
"no more heading restriction"
Yes, very strange phraseology.
There is one more thing that is strange in french airspace. I regularly get a radar heading of 25 degrees (or more!) off track for traffic separation, and this for quite a long time. In the rest of Europe I hardly ever get vectored more then 10 deg. off track. I recently visited Maastricht ATC, and one of the controllers told me that he'd been told during training that if he had to make an A/C turn by more then 10, he had probably made a mistake earlier. Does that mean that french ATC make a lot of mistakes, or do they simply have different working methods and procedures?
PS: It is certainly not my intention to pick on french ATC. As Max Angle said:
All a bit long winded on the RT sometimes in France but they more than make up for it by giving nice long direct routings
Amen to that.