Having looked at the figures yesterday, I just wanted to ammend my figures of how many push downs are made. When this all first started the number of pushdowns were between 15 on a good day to 30 on a bad day. Now most days are 5 or 6 push downs. Of those there are daily offenders like Air Zimbabwe who never files a flight plan when coming from Zim, and usually 3 coming from Baghdad, I guess understandable with other things on their mind.
Just again for the record, when there is a push down, we contact the Communications centre here to confirm verbally they don't have a flight plan. We personally check the FPL computer to make sure there isn't one for example filed on the wrong day or something, and then we advise the briefing office to advise us as soon as anything comes in. We then advise the FIR with the aircraft before us, to advise the pilot ASAP to get a flight plan filed to us on the correct addresses. We can only do this once we have recieved an estimate from that FIR, which can be 2 hours before or it can be 15 minutes. So as you can see we don't all sit on our hands and laugh at the poor aircraft being pushed down. The UAE ACC try everything we can to get a correct flight plan in our hands so we can leave the aircraft up.
As Fox said, its the same suspects over and over again, so the "we filed a flight plan, we promise", just doesn't wash I'm sorry. Bottom line is finally after years of slackness in the middle east the problem is finally being fixed. I say its a shame that other FIR's around us seem happy to take details in flight ( which often are wrong as the aircraft calls us and they are a different aircraft type, and shoot off flying on a different route than expected), and continue to accept mediocrity on the part of the airlines.