Hence a lot of bad habits were quietly corrected by professional flight-plan-senders
Until a few years ago almost every flight plan was simply faxed to the Heathrow FBU, or one of the others up north.
The staff there were handling ~3000 flight plans per month, nearly all VFR, and they either ignored obvious enroute specification c0ckups, or reinforced their workload by laboriously correcting them.
The funny side of all this is that all flight plans involving the UK get CCd into some secret database, for search/rescue and national security reasons. The latter purpose is done by a load of people sitting in some big room, collating radar returns crossing the national frontier with filed flight plans. They must have a lot of fun with it
It's obviously not a rigorous process because so many people have flown to/from say N French airports with a flight plan which was simply lost.
Now, Afpex allows you to file absolute garbage which nobody will correct.
Cobalt's "email" analogy is an apt one. It also helps to explain why the DOF/ parameter tends to work poorly on VFR flight plans.
The whole flight plan system is a mess - a legacy of the past 50-60 years.
For IFR flight plans, Europe has implemented a proper database-based system, only to have Eurocontrol screw it up with an impenetrable route validation system
