practice pan
Hi Gents,
With the risk of dredging up a thoroughly discussed and beaten to death subject.... the UK practice pan call. I understand, it's here, it's not going away(annoying as it is) and I even have to admit, it's a great service to have for private pilots I just wish there was a discrete frequency for the practice calls
Having said that, I do place ? marks at the practice pan I overheard yesterday. Flying to ABZ I heard the familiar "practice pan, 3 times.
Immediately started tuning it out. However moments later, overhearing the controller ask for the altitude of the caller, the answer was: FL160 or something like that. I thought I misheard. Moments later the controller asked for POB, the answer was 21. ????? Either this was an exceptionally large private airplane or it was a small regional airplane.
There's probably lot's of guys that can defend this, but in my book that's overly anal and cluttering radiowaves.
Any commercial passenger carrying/transport type airplane in the EU has multiple redundancy for navigation, is flying in a IFR environment, in constant contact with ATC with properly trained aircrew that even in the most remote chance that you would ever have to lose all navigation, lose your transponder...but still have a radio is already trained in the use of the practice pan.
What possible reason could there be for a commercially operated A/C to do a practice pan? seriously?