The ICAO Flight Plan – changes are coming!

The basics
If you are working in aviation, chances are you have seen an ICAO Flight Plan. Something that looks like the example here. It is a strange looking document showing clearly its origins in a world where clattering teletype machines were considered modern communications means. The double chevrons pointing left indicate “carriage return” and the three dashes above each other indicate line feeds… Yes, the ICAO Flight Plan form is a hybrid of text parts and instructions to the old teletype machines (and the modern computers that have replaced them) as to how the information is to be formatted on displays and hard copies of the flight plan. When transmitted via the Aeronautical Fixed telecommunications Network (AFTN), the flight plan takes the form of the famous FPL message.
Flight Plans are of vital importance for flights in managed airspace. This is basically the only means an airspace user has to tell air traffic control what they are planning to do. You either file your flight plan before departure or you file it from the air if you did not need a flight plan for the first part of your operation (if you flew in unmanaged airspace and then decide to go into managed airspace for example). The content must be accurate and it must be in the hands of air traffic control on a timely basis.
The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) has defined a number of so called standard field types, each identified by a number. Each field type contains defined information and the various air traffic services messages must contain the prescribed field types in the order specified for the given message. Message types in turn are identified by 3 letters. A message with message type designator CHG is a flight plan modification message and one with designator FPL is… well, you guessed it, a Flight Plan Message.
On the flight plan form you will find Items and not field types. Items are also numbered and they correspond to the numbers allocated to the field types. So both a field type 7 and an Item 7 will contain information on aircraft identification and SSR mode and code.
The rules for composing the messages and their content are very strict and are also globally standardized. This way ATS messages can be handled manually or by computers, irrespective of where they come from or whom they are addressed to.
Why the change?

The current flight plan form and its composition are several decades old. The progress in terms of aircraft capabilities and equipment fit has been spectacular and it became more and more cumbersome to properly describe the new capabilities and equipment fits using the original rules.
It is Item 10 – Equipment that run out of steam first and this resulted in more and more “overflow” information ending up in Item 18 – Other information. Considering that not so long ago there were several flight plan processing systems which did not process Item 18 at all, this direction of development not only made Item 18 increasingly messy but in many cases the data put in there was simply ignored. Clearly not an ideal situation.

Recognizing this, ICAO established a Flight Plan Study Group (FPLSG) and charged them to determine what changes were required to bring the flight plan (and all the associated messages) up to the standards of to-day and tomorrow. This is an item to remember! The changes will come in two batches, one set covering the immediate requirements, the other more advanced things like system wide information management, trajectory based operations and the like.
The first batch is relatively simple. The second will be much more fundamental…
What and when?
As you may or may not know, the ICAO provisions for flight plans are contained in a document called Procedures for Air Navigation Services – Air Traffic Management with ICAO document designator PANS-ATM, Doc 4444. Currently in its Fifteenth Edition, the first batch of changes to the flight plan provisions will be Amendment 1 to this document.
The changes will become applicable on 15 November 2012. Before you shrug your shoulders and say yeh, that is way in the future, please do remember that there are many systems in the world that will need to be modified to work with the new flight plan format and contents. A better reaction is to look around you and check whether your organization has in fact started the necessary work.
So what is going to change? ICAO has taken this opportunity to update most of the Items to better reflect to-day’s realities and terminology (among others removing the reference to poor SABENA in Item 7) but not surprisingly, the most fundamental changes come in Item 10 which becomes Equipment and Capabilities (was just Equipment before) and in Item 18 – Other Information. Whether these changes makes Item 18 any easier to read is another matter but there you are…
If you have access to the ICAO-NET website, you can access all relevant documents here.
Otherwise, you can download the text of Amendment 1 to PANS-ATM here.