Straight out of the manual: --- "Special VFR allows the relaxation by ATC, in certain circumstances, of some restrictions to facilitate the operation of a flight without lowering the flight safety to an unacceptable level. SVFR is usually applied by ATC in Class D or E Control Zones, when weather and traffic conditions permit to allow private pilots access to aerodromes within them. SVFR flight will not however, be permitted outside of Control Zones.
A flight plan is not required for an SVFR flight but ATC approval is. A request for a Special VFR clearance may be made in flight, but it may not necessarily be granted by ATC. Authorisation for an SVFR flight is a concession granted by ATC only when weather and traffic conditions permit. An SVFR clearance absolves the pilot from complying with: - the full requirements of IFR; and - the requirement to maintain a height of 1500ft above the highest fixed object within 600 metres of the aircraft if the height limitation specified in the clearance makes compliance with this requirement impossible." --- The bottom line is it isn't just for getting in and out below minimums. It is a required clearance before you will even be allowed into your destination if it lies within a class D or E CTR. In my *very* limited and mostly theoretical experience, SVFR clearances are given at fairly low altitudes 1000-2000ft to allow SVFR and IFR traffic to continue in the same control zone but obviously the SVFR flights are kept well away from the IFR ones. In most of the busy CTRs more often than not you will be refused an SVFR crossing and vectored around the edge of the CTR under a Radar Advisory Service by ATC. That is certainly the folklore anyway. AFAIK, (again, I may be wrong...) big airports such as Heathrow, Gatwick and Manchester do not allow SEP aircraft to land at all and will not accept non-IFR flights in or out. I've just looked at Southern England on my chart and most of it is class A above 2500' in the vacinity of the airports and class A from 4500' + due to the density of airways converging on the TMAs of the various big airports. Manchester in the North is famed for not permitting movements anywhere near it. SVFR or not. They provide a small low level corridor between Liverpool John Lennon and Manchester Int. which is marked "NOT ABOVE 1250' Manchester QNH". This is meant to avoid the sizeable extra distance you would have to travel if routed around them. I've heard that often it is so congested that it's better to go around and pay for the fuel and hours rather than with your life... On the one hand, I am lucky because I live and fly further north where there are hardly any restrictions apart from airways which start at FL85+ (we are allowed to request crossing an airway but only at it's base FL and at 90 deg to the airway). On the other hand, I get very little experience of clearances and procedures coming from an untowered airfield. To try and combat this my flight school make sure we do a qualifying cross country which sees us cross lots of Military Air Traffic Zones (MATZs) and also land at Humberside international airport which is class D, I believe, and allows SEP aircraft and students too :-) There is an excellent piece in this months Flyer magazine which disproves some of the folk lore about refused clearances and makes for interesting reading. If you plan on flying here then I recommend getting hold of a copy and reading it. All the best, Matt. On 21:58 Fri 06 Feb , David Megginson wrote: > I love visiting the UK, but it doesn't sound like a fun place to be a pilot > with all those costs and restrictions. Outside of the occasional temporary > flight restriction (TFR) in the U.S., I'm aware of nowhere in North America > below FL180 that you need an instrument rating and IFR clearance to fly. > Sometimes pilots have to reserve landing slots at the busiest airports like > KLAX, but typically you just show up, and the fees are usually very low > (some big airports, like Philadelphia, have no landing fee at all for a > piston single). _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
