out of ICAO region
 

I hope someone can clarify this.

Today I delivered a clearance to BKPR. Made me wonder, so I looked it up. Pristina in former Yugoslavia.

How come Pristina got a location indicator starting with B... als for North Atlantic, instead of L... southern Europe. I can't imagine they ran out of letters.

Thx, FR

Pristina has ATC service provided by NATO, maybe that should be some link with B for North Atlantic...

ATS provided in Kosovo falls under the jurisdiciton of ICAO's Technical Co-operation Bureau on behalf of the UN and others.

Go to http://www.icao.org and use the search function found under the 'Strategic Objectives' section for "Kosovo". It'll turn up a power-point presentation on what the TCB does and where it does it, including Kosovo. (Note - you'll need a current version of MS Internet Explorer for it to work).

Kosovo remains legally part of Serbia & Montenegro but in reality Serbia has no longer any real jurisdiction within Kosovo which may account for the fact that the ICAO location ID for Pristina is not of a Serb/Yugoslav 'LY**' type. You might therefore find that the BKPR stands for Balkans, Kosovo, PRistina and is a temporary designator until such time as the region's future is resolved fully. (i.e remains part of Serbia, becomes part of Albania or does its own thing entirely).

Rgds
T3

PS Another geographic anomaly is the last remaining French territory in North America, St Pierre-et-Miquelon - a stones throw off the south coast of Newfoundland: LFVP and LFVM. You'd think that following the Caribbean xample of 'TF**' for French territories they should be 'BFVP' and 'BFVM' instead of 'LF....', but who am I to say...

Thanks for your help.

I'd imagined, they'd keep politics out of something as straight forward as location indicators.

Meanwhile I found some more irregularities. It seems there is always someone trying to make a political statement.

FR

FoxRomeo
 

I think your political statement idea is a bit strong; I think it would be better to consider the "code" as a kind of address similar to a post code. Sometimes it is convenient to send your mail to a particular mailbox because that is the information collation point.
If you get a clearance to EGYP you may not end up in East Anglia!