Navigation in France 2016

It seems to me that anyone flying in or around France this year could do a lot worse than use the 1:1000000 charts sold by Cartabossy. The cartographer Jean Bossy has been creating and selling aviation charts since 1988 and as a pilot himself, has a good idea of what information pilots require and what works and what doesn’t.

As well as covering the whole of France, the charts also cover Belgium, Luxembourg and Switzerland, which is a big bonus for anyone doing a bit of extended touring. They come in two versions – weekdays and weekends/French national holidays.

This is important because during weekdays, France is criss-crossed by restricted low-level areas and corridors used for training by the Air Force. These are not active every weekday (you need to consult the French Air Pilot, which gives 24 hours notice if any on your planned route will be active, and during what time slots) but are usually inactive during weekends and national holidays, so can then be ignored. Some other areas of controlled airspace also become inactive at weekends, as will be seen later.

I have no connection with Cartabossy but am an enthusiastic user for reasons I’ll go on to explain, and the charts in question can be obtained at relatively low cost (weekdays 17.50€, weekends 12.50€) from the Cartabossy web site, as shown below.

OK, so what is it about the Cartabossy charts that makes me so enthusiastic? Simple. Firstly, as I’ll go on to show, they are very good charts, and just as in the UK, to be totally legal, you must have an up-to-date chart with you in the aircraft at all times. Also, their annotations, although a bit quirky until you become familiar with them, are in both French and English, so no problem for anyone who may not have a good command of French. But the clincher for me is that unlike any others that I’ve found in France, when you buy the paper editions, you also get a download link to electronic versions of the same charts, as the next image shows.

This is very useful if you have a GPS system, because the chance is that you will be able to download one or more electronic charts in a format that will load straight into it, and for absolutely no extra charge. As the next pic shows, the formats include simple ones like PDFs and JPGs, which of course, contain no georeferencing and are therefore of little practical navigational use, as well as others that do. This means that there’s probably one that’s compatible with your system.

The non-georeferenced formats were made available first and while I was waiting, I downloaded the JPGs, which I then converted into exportable QCTs by manually georeferencing them using JPR text files. These are compatible with my good old MemoryMap system and they worked fine. Except I always then compare my results against Google Earth and I found that having adjusted the files ‘to fit’ in my home area, they were ever-so-slightly out the further north I went.

Being a bit of a perfectionist, this wasn’t quite good enough for me, so I waited until the Geotiffs were available, and tried loading those into MemoryMap directly. And the results were perfect.

In fact, it didn’t take me long to find some free tools that allow me to edit the Geotiff files in Photoshop to add features that I need eg our airfield, Malbec, is too new to have been included, so I added it myself. Editing removes the georeferencing, which you need to extract beforehand and then add back again afterwards and there are DOS tools to do just that. But please note – most people will never need to be troubled by such esoteric matters as the downloaded Geotiffs reflect the latest charts ‘as is’ and can be used directly in GPS systems!

Here are a couple of shots that are actually screen shots taken from my PC of the edited charts in action. I have the same charts loaded into my tablet and mobile phone, quite copyright legally of course, for navigational purposes in the air.

The first shot shows my local area and is taken from the ‘weekday’ chart.

Let’s take a look at some of the features. The first thing that strikes the eye is that the chart is covered by lots of little pale blue circles. This is fantastic news for we ULM/microlight pilots, because these are all of the ULM airfields taken from the latest FFPLUM file. I managed to get them onto the chart I made up last year but this is even better because as well as showing each one, the direction of its principal runway and whether it’s grass or paved, their LF references (without the LF to keep the chart uncluttered) are also shown.

There’s a full list of LF numbers on each chart giving contact details, which is useful in itself. But in addition, this means that anyone planning an extended tour, as we did up the west coast of France last year, can then get the full details of the ULM fields in which they are interested from the internet, including circuit details, printable landing cards and the facilities that are available at each one. This is a brilliant resource and one which we’ll be using later in the year to plan this year’s tour.

Now the other more general features. As I mentioned previously, the annotations are a bit quirky, especially for anyone used to the highly formalised UK approach, but you soon get used to them. The charts are restricted just to features for flights at relatively low level so don’t include details of airways, for example. And although separate ‘transponder mandatory zones’ are shown (I’ve not found one yet), as all French airspace above and including Class D is transponder mandatory, only such airspace is shown.

In fact, I’ve been told that if you’re lucky, you’ll get permission to enter or cross most French Class D airspace without a transponder so long as you are in touch with the relevant AT service, but up to now I’ve not been able to confirm that.

Now let’s take a look at some other features, using Bergerac airport as an example. The broken line around its zone shows that it’s inside Class D airspace (‘Class D’ not shown to save clutter) so you need permission to enter it. The code around the airfield name shows that it’s approach frequency is 119.8 (1 missed off to save clutter), it’s height is 171 feet, that it charges landing fees ($), has lighting available (L), Avgas is permanently available (red dot) and Jet A1 between published hours only (*).

All good stuff to know. The diameters of the ULM circles and the lengths of the runway boxes inside them also reflect the runway lengths available (under or over 400m), but that’s not all. The little triangle next to many of them also shows the preferred approach direction and where appropriate, there’s also a little arrow indicating if the final turn is a right hand one.

But there’s even more! If the little runway box extends only from the boundary to the centre of the circle, that means that the airfield is of a ‘mountain’ type, like Wim’s and Malbec, which you can only land on in one direction and take off in the other. This is an amazing and incredibly useful source of information for planning flights to far off, otherwise unknown airfields.

I could go on but there’s far too much to mention here and it’s all clearly covered in French and English on the paper versions of the charts. And now to finish off, the same area as shown above but taken from the ‘weekend’ version. See what’s different?

I for one had no idea that Brive’s Class D airspace lapsed at weekends, but it does according to the chart. I’ll have to give them a ring and find out for sure and also what their landing fee will be for the Savannah. It might be good fun to fly in there for breakfast and a cup of coffee one Sunday 😉