Originally Posted by
Eau de Boeing
While we are on here, I have another Gatwick question.
Unfortunately I fly the world's biggest and ugliest aircraft on a regular basis into Crawley international and every time we do the aircraft behind us are always changed to an RNAV approach at the last minute, which I am guessing is because of the potential of the aircraft infringing the ILS critical area on 26L/08R??
On our LIDO (approach) charts it states that if we exit by certain points then we don't impact on this at all and 99.9% of the time you will see guys using "brake to vacate" and we can tell you not only exactly where we plan to exit, but also our runway occupancy time to the second.
At all other UK airports, this is never an issue as it seems to be communicated that we can exit long before getting close to the area so is there something that we are not aware of or can we help each other in minimizing last minute approach changes, particularly if it requires higher minima on a marginal day? Our regular approach speed at max landing weight is comparable to an A320 and we can stop and vacate in a short distance if required.
It used to be at LHR that Director or even London would ask at an early stage where we planned to vacate to help planning and we have normally selected an exit long before even getting into UK airspace and we will always advise if we need a longer than normal length to vacate, it is just knowing when to put this into conversation.
Would be interested to get some feedback on this to hand back to fellow dugong drivers.
Cheers
EdB
The following aircraft should be told more or less on first contact with gatwick if they are to expect an RNAV approach rather than 'at the last minute'! ;-)
I don't think it's really a problem for the following aircraft except on the very rare occasions when weather precludes an RNAV and a 20 mile gap is required.
On the subject of speeds, are you expecting 160 to 5 or 160 to 4?