Originally Posted by
eivissa
I have done my share of offshore flying out of most of the countries surrounding the Northsea. The Dutch system with their KZ-routes is the best Ive seen. Germany would be smart to adopt their system indeed, but they havent gotten there yet.
I work for one of the 3 companies which fly offshore (windparks ) out of northern Germany. Unlike to offshore flights out of Aberdeen, where they use HMRs based on a VOR Radial, we use a GPS routing system including the Dutch KZ routes and assigned altitudes created by all major German offshore operators and DFS couple years ago. There is no IFR flights into Class G (German airspace) of course you can go IFR on your return leg back to onshore ( class E), where ATC needs you to be at 3000ft before IFR starts. You could also depart IFR from offshore to a point in space ( Waypoint "Juist") and then proceed VFR from there....
We have GPS routes guiding us to the OSS/ offshore Substations in and out of the windparks, however they are not considered GPS approaches as there is no IFR in German class g airspace .
Someone mentioned ARA approaches Into clustered windparks... If you have done any ARA into a Oil and Gas Platform and now you wanne use that same indea to approach a substation right in the middle of 50-100 windmills, all I will say about that is, GOOD LUCK.
Keep in mind windparks don't look the same, the wind turbines aren't positioned the same, the clusters never look the same. Some OSS are right at the edge of the windparks, some in the middle some , some more to the southern side, some on the northern edge....mass you can see there is lots of free styling going.
The solution will be GPS approaches into windparks but that will take sometime before that will be reality. For now we are limited to 600ft and 1500m in class g in Germany.
In Dutch class G Airspace IFR is allowed. Keep in mind if you talk to Bremen radar/information they won't see you below ~ 1500 ft. In the Dutch airspace however they seemed to be able to see you at any altitude and you can even reach them on the radio when you are down on the platform....something Germany is lacking. Also there is no frequency for helicopter only even though on busy days we have around 12 helicopters in the air at once, sharing the same frequencies with hobby pilots and commercial jets.
But DFS says they don't have the money to put one ATC controller aside. And even if they did, radar coverage is Poor below 1500-2000 ft agl. In Scotland they have traffic service based on SSR. A simple system to be implemented but again, nobody wants to pick up the bill. As always, someone needs to die before something happens.
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