I have a question about the away status and whether or not it grants me safe passage with areas that are centered up.
I’m currently on a flight between Chicago (KORD) and Frankfurt (EDDF). I’m using the Airbus A340, and since the certain plane’s fuel burn is quite high at higher altitudes, I’ll be flying it between FL270 and FL310.
As part of my route, I’m directly flying over the London airspace, which is projected to have hundreds of arrivals in the next few hours. With that being said, since my altitude is so low, I will be likely directly intervening with approaching traffic.
It gets even worse. I am treating this flight as a total sleeper flight; I won’t wake up until a few minutes before TOD. Since I’m starting early, I have to also make a 7 hour flight into a 9 hour one, which is why I’m at mach 0.71.
So I won’t be blasting through the busy airspace, more like taking my grand old time. I know centers are encouraged to ignore away aircraft, but I’m afraid it won’t be that easy since I’m flying so low, and unable to step climb.
Any assistance would be appreciated. I’m well on my way now and at FL310 for the moment.
Hi, there is nothing to be afraid of! As long as your status shows inactive, Center will ignore you and solve possible conflicts with other options they have. But remember if you decided to climb or start to descend, contact ATC first and say your intentions.
I will be landing in Frankfurt, so my descent won’t commence until after I’ve left England. I was just wondering, since there is a chance I take my plane all the way down to FL270 (or FL250 if it really goes badly) if fuel starts becoming an issue, wouldn’t that intervene with the descending aircraft? I’m up at FL310 and I only have 60 minutes of spare fuel left, so although I’m safe up here at 310 I don’t know if the plane can handle it.
I never tried A340 in IF but as a general rule higher altitude will grant you less fuel burning. So I can’t see the reason you should descend to lower altitude.
I’m using the fuel calculator, the optimal altitude is FL280, so either FL270 or FL290 since I’m eastbound. I’m also at 90% load so I can’t go past like FL330 anyways.
Start your flight at FL280 To FL300. If you had chance later, climb to higher Altitude as you lose weight. Even at FL250 you should be good passing Active Airspace as long as your status shows inactive :)
Thank you for the assistance! I’ll put it up at FL310 since the fuel situation has calmed. For the away status, if I go to sleep soon, when I cross London (7 hours from now), does it say “Away 7 hours”? And is there any way to accidentally trigger it?
It only shows away and as far as I know there is no way you trigger it to active mode,unless you work with ATC panel, or start to climb/descend. be sure your VNAV is not activated in Autopilot!
I got a question: I haven’t been flying in IF in a bit. 1 year and 4 months to be specific. I am not aware of this featured of being active/inactive. How does that work, how do I activate the inactive status? Flying from CDG to JFK right now at FL36, is not that case that I need a inactive status, but there were and will be many cases where I would like that :)
That massage is a response to the question: “ Tapping the screen or looking at it won’t cause me to be active, right?”.Is that accurate ? I mean it would make sense if it’s just a touch. But what happens in a major touch event?