Depature from an airway (IFR) to land at CTAF

[Mark.]

Hi Guys,
I’m wanting to find out the correct planning method to leave a airways route on a IFR flight. Eg say the flight was depart Townsville W232 for Carnarvon Gorge / Ingelara, actually it’s (rewan grass strip) via Clermont w766 and W613 from Emerald.
The question is: Am I correct in flight planning to Roma via W613 and once I’m past Emeral, call up Brisbane centre and request flight plan amendment for a landing at Ingelara & Request traffic for a visual track & descent into Ingelara (assuming we are VMC) as they would not have heard of Rewan! Or just plan Emerald direct Rewan and not bother with the airway?

[AerocatS2A]

Plan what you want to do, in this case Emerald direct to Rewan. Provided you comply with general route requirements, there is no need to fly on an airways route if that route doesn’t actually go where you want it to. This is basically what you do with any plan, direct from the most appropriate enroute waypoint to the aerodrome, it just happens that for most places the enroute waypoint is only 1nm or so from the aerodrome reference (e.g, YBTL DCT TVL) while for Rewan you don’t have such a close convenient waypoint.

If ATC don’t like your plan for some reason, they will query it and you can come up with something else that fits in better with them. In the first instance just plan what you want though. The charter flights for the mining industry do this sort of thing all the time and it is highly unlikely there would be any issue.

When you get to top of descent tell ATC and they will give you traffic if they haven’t already. They won’t know or care if you are VMC or not, that’s up to you to ensure your descent below LSALT complies with the rules.

As for ATC not knowing Rewan, look in the AIP at the user guide for the flight notification form. A departure or destination with no approved 4 letter code should be entered as ZZZZ in item 16 then in item 18 you put “DEST/[lat long]” and “RMK/REWAN”. Now ATC know where Rewan is!

[Mark.]

Ok, that’s fantastic feedback. I was told to try and stay on an aiways here possible.
in this case plan for Roma then file a flight plan amendment for Rewan.

When departing with a taxi & departure report would ATC have rewan on screen etc to show no reported IFR traffic or would that be an operational type of advice? I’m not sure of the radar coverage down there.
Mark.

[le Pingouin]

As a controller my response would be "don't be daft!" :) Yes, the general idea is to plan via airways where possible, but it's not an absolute rule.

Far simpler all around and more sensible to do what Aerocat suggests (which is basically standard practice) - file what you intend to do so you don't have to amend your plan in-flight and we don't have to fiddle with your flight plan to amend your destination to a lat long. I'm not sure I've encountered anyone deliberately doing what you were proposing, other than for training purposes.

Provided you've planned the departure point defined as per Aerocat's example (ZZZZ with the departure point defined DEP/[lat long]) we'll get a flight plan track displayed on the screen at that lat long once we activate your plan on your taxi advice and can assess traffic accordingly. Easy as.

[Mark.]

Brilliant, Thankyou Aerocat & Le Pingouin for your input, that's Crystal clear now.