Originally Posted by BackPacker
- French pilots flying in France, in French designed and built aircraft (eg. Robins) do not see the need to communicate in English, strangely enough. Make a crib sheet of the most important circuit calls in French. Also some airfields have nobody on the ground, so you might need to talk to "traffic".
Maybe because France is one of the few countries in the world where you can "officially" use your own language on frequency, as long french is an ICAO language. English is only required for emergency procedures and Civilian French Rules say that a controller
can't speak in english to a pilot if the first contact was made in french...
I'm french myself, trying to obtain my PPL (but this is more presently the lack of money wich make some delays) and fly a lot virtually on IVAO network. I'm a bit aware of what's going on in France.
To answer the first question, I should say you can find any of our charts, in english, either through Eurocontrol (but no VAC chart) or on our french civilian administration directly :
http://www.sia.aviation-civile.gouv.fr/default_uk.htm
Note you can in AIP section get all VAC, IAC, ARR/DEP and information plates of any french airport.
There's some usefull information here as well (but in french only) from french army (but documents are in two languages) :
http://www.dircam.air.defense.gouv.fr/dia/
Hope this will help you.