ATC Question Thread

[SDQDI]

I was always taught that your height was transmitted as amsl and everyone around here does that, well unless someone is doing a 500ft circuit or 500ft run but then they mention agl very clearly.

 

 

[Jaba-who]

it. This now makes not adhering to the (I us jepps) communication section, or AIP, a breach of 82A.

Then in the AIP somewhere (AU 915.6.1.5 for jepps) in the communicationssection that the "following information whilst primarily for controlled airspace should use these phrases unless specific class G procedures are shown."

 

Then 6.3.3 goes on to say that " reported level figures must be preceded by flight level when referenced to standard pressure and feet when referenced to QNH"

I have never heard of jepps as a legal force. I thought it was a navigation database. But anyway it will carry no weight in law here.

 

 

[ben87r]

Jeppes are the AIP, just a different format and approved by CASA. So same legal reference.

 

 

[Jaba-who]

Jeppes are the AIP, just a different format and approved by CASA. So same legal reference.

Where can I find them? I presume when you say Jeppes you are meaning Jeppeson

 

 

[ben87r]

Yes correct. They are not online but I'm sure someone here who is literate in both could provide a reference, short of that the same is stated in the AIP in the same section that covers communication and phraseology. If you can't find it I'll have a look through it when I get home this arvo.

 

 

[Birdseye]

Height AGL has no relevance in position reporting, whether in Australia or elsewhere. QFE i.e. AGL height is for those who can't do simple arithmetic.

 

 

[djpacro]

QFE i.e. AGL height is for those who can't do simple arithmetic.

Yep e.g. competition aerobatic pilots

[facthunter]

QFE is actual aerodrome height set to read zero, on the aircraft's altimeter It does simplify circuits but it's NOT used here, or generally so you have to do the mental gymnastics for the height of your circuit parts.=, and you are reference MSL

 

So you set your subscale as described. An actual QNH close by or the time adjusted forecast QNH.. If you are asked to report altitude, that's the way you do it. based on that setting (unless above transition level where you set 1013.2.)

 

If you are going out to do some circuits and have no other information, adjust to put the actual ELEV.( the actual height) of the aerodrome at the ARP or adjusted for known differences of surface level Ie the threshold for a particular runway may be known to be 50feet below the ARP shown on the terminal chart. It's the only way to provide separation with ALL people using the same reference.

 

Just noted DJP's post They rely on height above actual GROUND level for some manoeuvers so would need the most easily interpreted HEIGHT above ground as a reference., Baro instruments don't give actual heights anyhow as the are based on a "standard atmosphere" not the actual one existing unless by co-incidence. Nev

 

 

[Garfly]

This is the famous example of what can happen if one gets those sums wrong:

 

 

 

[ben87r]

Gen 3.4 4.1.5 and Gen 3.4 4.4.3 are the AIP references Jabba.

 

 

[Garfly]

I found this mesmerising - a 36min in-cockpit, single-shot video of a pilot in a Diamond twin (DA42) - making an instrument approach and landing into busy Frankfurt International in stormy weather. He does a great job under pressure, assisted by his Garmin G1000 set-up with weather radar. The controllers (approach, director, tower) also do a great job calmly fitting the light twin in with the heavy-metal especially given that many are calling "unable" to steer assigned headings due CBs etc.

 

It'd be nice to have comments from our local ATC people as to the differences in style they notice (assuming anyone has the time or inclination to sit through it all - something of a busman's holiday for controllers!)

 

 

 

[nathan_c]

I only watched from about halfway and did skip a bit of it, but if I had to name one thing different to us was the radio transmissions. We use standard phraseology and readbacks a lot more then they seem to. There was a lot of readbacks without callsigns/ reading back of only roger to headings/levels etc where as we require all of that read back to us. We also wouldnt say approved to a heading req, we would read that back to the pilot as an instruction too.

 

 

[Bennyboy320]

Interesting to watch him use a rag to clean his windscreen from the 12.00 point,the window heat & or demist is pretty poor, all I can say is that hopefully that won't happen to him at the CAT1 minimum, i.e. not visual due low vis in the cockpit, another reason I would never fly IFR in a bug smasher, the DA42 is a new a/c wonder what a clapped out 40 year old Piper or Cessna would be like.

 

 

[Jaba-who]

Yep I agree Nathan. Intuitively you would think that would be be accompanied by a higher incidence of problems. The bizarre thing is that their incidence of problems is way less than ours.

 

And then consider the US situation where the use of read backs etc is similarly low AND they use a huge amount of unintelligible ( to me) slang and somewhat good-ol'-boy pilot talk.

 

Again you'd think it would lead to more problems but we know that US is much safer to fly in the Oz.

 

 

[Garfly]

Nathan, yeah, a YouTube commenter picked up on that point too (comparing it to the US):

 

Geoffrey Gallaway

 

 

 

I agree, I'm just used to US controllers being very strict about

 

the identification in their transmissions. Great video, very educational.

 

And Jaba, I was surprised by your comment that our ATC system actually has more problems than either the US or Europe (despite our [presumed] close adherence to ICAO rules). Can you tell us what data that's based on?

 

Anyway, for those interested (single pilot IFR ain't exactly RAAus core material) the vid's dissected in detail here.

 

Flying - Youtube video - DA42 IFR into Frankfurt in heavy weather

 

Quite a few pros complain, among other things, that the pilot's still negotiating a taxiway turnoff on late final [no doubt, all too conscious of the airliner on his tail] and point to the tower's amusing (non-procedural) advice: "keep your eyes on the runway". But most are pretty impressed by the way he handled a tough situation and appreciate his posting the video for its educational value. To save trawling the thread, here's a typical critique:

 

what_next

 

02-Jun-16 14:08

 

 

 

#55 Vref wrote:

 

Well, its easy to criticize on a video…

 

 

 

Sure. But it was his own decision to show his remarkable flight to all 7 billion people on this planet by posting it on YouTube. Therefore he must expect to attract some criticism…

 

 

 

I join this conversation late because I have been flying around Germany in the last few days in similar weather (which will stay with us for some more days…) with not much internet access. Also I did not watch the full 30x minutes of it (what has become of the art of video editing? 10 minutes would have been more than enough) by skipping over some of it.

 

 

 

Would I have been sitting next to him in either my function as ME/IR instructor or bizjet training captain, those would have been my main points in the debrief:

 

 

 

Good:

 

- His R/T, navigation skills and mastery of the aeroplane and systems are really good. With one exception, the weather radar (more of that later).

 

 

 

Not so good:

 

 

 

- Maybe it was in one of the parts that I skipped over, but I didn’t see him reading a single checklist. Landing in Frankfurt gear-up during such a busy time of day will cause 7-figure losses to the airport and the dozens of airliners he will force to divert until the runway is cleared of his wreck. Totally unacceptable for me. But again, maybe I simply missed those bits.

 

 

 

- The closer he gets to the runway, the more his hands fly all over the place. Pressing buttons here and there, whatever. Set yourself a “stabilisation gate”, 500ft above field elevation would be a sensible figure for this kind of aircraft, by which the aircraft has to be fully configured for landing and on speed. From then on, one hand stays on the stick/yoke, the other on the throttle and your eyes on the runway (as the controller tells him, the best part of the video by the way!). And keep your hands and eyes exactly there until you have either left the runway or established positive rate of climb in case of a go-around. And use the yellow lines for taxiing off the runway. Getting stuck in the mud with one wheel while taking a shortcut will also shut down the airport long enough to cause a seven-figure financial damage.

 

 

 

- Weather radar: Please Mr. YouTube pilot, get someone to show you how to use a weather radar. I know this is not taught during training (because trainers are usually not equipped with one and training flights are not done in weather which requires one either). And it really cannot be learned from reading books of blogposts. It is an art which needs to be taught on the job. One of the reasons why many hours/years of flying in the right hand seat are required before being given the command in a commercial all-weather flying operation.

 

The radar in that video is set up in a way which shows a screen full of nasty stuff. Yet the pilot flies right through every bit of it. What’s the point of having a weather radar then? I think it was set-up in a less than optimal way because the actual weather is not as bad as it looks on the screen. Because had it been really as bad, then this little plane would have been torn to pieces.

 

 

 

- Decision making. I have not seen his flight preparation nor the weather charts and forecasts. But if those conditions were actually forecast, then flying into a place like EDDF in a little puddle jumper like this is not a very smart move. Traffic density is such that not every request for a heading change around storm cells can be granted by ATC (as can be seen in the video). When his first request to avoid a cell was denied he would still have had plenty of options for a diversion elsewhere. It looks as if the cloud base and cloud coverage would even have permitted a VFR diversion into a place lilke Egelsbach. Yet he accepted to fly through something his (however setup) weather radar showed him as being potentially dangerous. And from then on he continued regardless of what his radar picture shows. In the commercial world, this kind of decision making would buy him at least one more year in the right hand seat.

 

 

 

Don’t want to sound smart here, but again, showing one’s achievements to the whole world attracts criticism. The video is a good example of what is (just) possible with a light plane, but it could have been different if one of the blobs on his radar screen had in reality been a fully developed thunderstorm with lightning, ice and hail and up- and downdrafts in excess of 5000 ft/min. Lots of stuff to be learned here.

 

 

[nathan_c]

I havnt looked up any statistics, so this is all my own opinion and I am not going to argue any points after this post, but I would personally be sceptical that we are so much more unsafe to fly in then other countries. Personally I think if you believe the other countries are magically better/safer etc due to poor radio discipline I think you are dreaming.

 

As for Australia requiring standard phraseology and insisting on correct read backs and instructions, I am extremely glad we do. I have lost track of the amount of times there has been callsign confusion/ incorrect readbacks/ pilots misunderstanding instructions etc etc, and thats with our 'strict' policies. If we did not enforce this, I shudder to think what we wouldnt catch and what could go wrong/what would be misunderstood, and I think allowing R/T like displayed in that video is honestly a little dangerous.

 

 

[Jaba-who]

Garfly wrote - " ....snip ....And Jaba, I was surprised by your comment that our ATC system actually has more problems than either the US or Europe (despite our [presumed] close adherence to ICAO rules). Can you tell us what data that's based on? ...snip..."

 

Actually I was referring to the whole accident, incident, deaths, crashes (and just about about everything you can think of related to flying.) not specifically ATC events. (That data is freely available and CASA have even put it out themselves within the recent past year.)

 

when you look at the stats of just about everything bad related to aviation Australia shows up pretty poorly compared to the US and I think in the last couple of years is getting worse. As far to Europe goes we have a higher accident and incident rate though some would suggest thats because general aviation is screwed so badly (rules and costs) in Europe that low time pilots now constitute a very small part of the flying population.

 

In relation to ATC my comments were to suggest that despite strict ATC terminologies and requirements here in Oz we actually have those poorer overall stats rate.

 

As far as specific ATC stuff goes, in relation to language which was what we were talking about in that part of the thread - etc. At one time we were allowed to use a lot of local terminologies and slang. After a few incidents (including one here in my home town where a low time GFPT pilot (who is a friend of mine) had an altercation with an inbound 747, CASA came out with the edict that local terminologies and non-standard phrases could no longer be used. I have no idea if it decreased the actual incidence of same sort of dramas but anecdotally they still seem to happen despite the rules. But in US they DO have lower incidents/accidents than us and they do use heaps of their "own" style of traffic talk that is way looser than ours. And it's certainly not ICAO standard terminolgies.

 

so our use of strict comms techniques can't really be helping.

 

We are now required to use very strict Terminologies ( and ATC get pretty finicky if you don't - I had an ATC repeat requests a couple of times for me to say the exact words last weekend. ) and yet many of these strict terminologies don't rally seem to either make sense nor add anything to the safety of aviation. Silly stuff like "Behind the landing 737, line up. Behind" As if you'd line up up anywhere else except behind. That's just the only thing I can think of at the moment but there are plenty of others.

 

 

[Garfly]

Yeah, well, it's true, we have had a lot of serious near hits. We've been lucky. (No idea, though, how we compare to the rest of the world on a proper like-to-like basis.) But I guess CASA and AsA would reckon those incidents are caused by not enough procedural compliance rather than too much of it. And a lot do come down to language and (mis) understanding.

 

Regarding read backs and standard phrases, I'd say that ever since Tenerife (still the world's worst airline disaster; and one caused purely by poor communication) authorities are super-serious about clarity of radio comms. I think I read that it was after Tenerife that the term 'take-off' was declared NEVER to be uttered by any controller, anywhere, other than in the phrase "Cleared for take-off".

 

Similarly the repetition in "Behind the landing 737, line up. Behind" (re-repeated as read-back) must be meant to prevent some pilot, some one-in-a-million time, hearing a controller say "Lineup ... /screech/over-transmit/ blah blah" and promptly power onto the active as directed - but in front of.

 

This is an FAA document about the Tenerife disaster:

 

Lessons Learned

 

In any case, as has been mentioned here heaps of times, the day one of our lighties brings down an RPT will be the day we kiss goodbye to many of our taken-for-granted freedoms of the air.

 

 

[shags_j]

We don't want to get into a comparative discussion I this thread about safety in Aus vs rest of world ( which i would like to have in another thread) we are picky about some read backs. If i clear you to "sydney via sanad flight planned route" and you read back "sydney via sanad" then you flew sanad direct to yssy then i would get into trouble. So sometimes we May seem picky on readbacks but its usually for a good reason though maybe not obvious to the pilot.

 

 

[ian00798]

The read back is one of the last lines of defence in the system, and that is why we are very fussy about it. One of the regular missed read backs is clear to leave control area descending. It's a descent clearance and needs to be read back just like if I cleared you to descend to a level.

 

In any case, as has been mentioned here heaps of times, the day one of our lighties brings down an RPT will be the day we kiss goodbye to many of our taken-for-granted freedoms of the air.

It has happened in America, and created massive changes (1986 Cerritos mid-air collision - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

 

I would suggest it would likely end the chances of RA AUS getting controlled airspace access, and bring a mandatory ADSB for all aircraft mandate. Not to mention many lives lost, so something we really badly want to avoid.

 

 

[Yenn]

It is not conclusive that poor radio procedures caused the Tenerife disaster. The skipper was a typical arrogant Dutchman and his second pilot queried his decision. "We go " was the response and they did. with terrible consequences.

 

If you don't like my opinion of dutchmen, it is something I have come to over 50 plus years of dealing with them.

 

 

[Garfly]

Sure, there were many causes including those key-player temperaments. But in the context of this thread the fact that confusion reigned in the cockpit regarding the 'take-off clearance' remains a lesson to us all about the need for read backs and for clarity of radio comms generally.

 

BTW, I certainly didn't take your valid point about the KLM captain to be anything like an 'opinion of dutchmen'. On that point, though, I can only say I've had the opposite experience in life; many of the dearest, most modest, people I've ever met hail from old Holland. Go figure! No accounting for human factors! ;-)

 

 

[Aldo]

Actually I was referring to the whole accident, incident, deaths, crashes

Jabba

 

There are three things which are able to change these stats, maybe we don't reach the standards of other countries in these three areas.

 

1. Training
    
    
   
2. Practice (i.e. hours in the seat)
    
    
   
3. Airmanship (I believe this is the most important of all)
    
    
   

 

 

For some reason in Australia we think we can thumb our noses at the rules (like them or not) and do what we like (I see it all the time) without any consequences, well the consequences are in those stats.

 

I fly class G, E, Control & restricted most weeks and the ATC requirements are not (in my opinion) excessive.

 

I was speaking to a CASA representative last week following an evening held in Toowoomba around airspace changes in the Oakey, Wellcamp, Toowoomba area (which I wasn't able to attend) and he told me that one of the attendees told him at the meeting that his instructor (RAA) has told him not to have his transponder on, not to turn on his radio and if he did have his radio on not to talk to anyone, beggars belief.

 

The sooner we get past the idea that the regs are there to annoy us and start to follow all of them the sooner we will get the stats inline with the other countries.

 

Aldo

 

 

[Yenn]

If an instructor RAA or GA tells you to turn off your transponder and radio, that instructor is not a fit and proper person to be instructing. The rules we fly under were brought about by lessons learned over the early years of flying and while CASA may be making them harder to understand, they are completely relevant.

 

Don't be a fool all your life, take a day off now and then.

 

 

[facthunter]

If fools only affected themselves, it would still be bad enough, but to follow their advice means you have adopted their foolishness for yourself and that's a health hazard. Nev