Bristol SIDs / STARs

[SteveSmith]

I am a regular pax in and out of Bristol, and in a quiet moment at work today, I was looking on AIS to find the routes in and out of the airport that I normally go on.

Looking at the SIDs, I recognise the routes (as far as you can tell looking out of a cabin window), particulary the BCN one, which I think is the one used on my most frequent trips to Edinburgh / Glasgow.

However, the STARs all converge into a hold over the airport, which isn't how I've ever approached. The most common approach I know (to R27) is over Avonmouth and Filton, then clockwise around the city to intercept the localiser. Is this a defined route which is set down somewhere, or do ATC always take aircraft off the defined STAR and vector them around this way?

Thanks,

Steve.

[Rainboe]

It's actually unusual to follow a STAR all the way to the end- in the overwhelming majority of cases, a radar vector to ILS is given, sometimes right at the beginning of the STAR.

[BOAC]

Steve - the charts you are looking at are what are known as 'procedural' charts and show the procedure to be followed if there is no ATC service available which can direct the aircraft - eg the radar might be down for maintenance? They will normally 'focus' onto an approach beacon of some sort and allow the a/c to then navigate itself to the final approach.

As Rainboe says, most of the time ATC take a/c pretty well direct to the centreline.

[Standard Noise]

Traffic from the north (Glasgow, Edinburgh, Manch etc) routes from a point northwest of Brecon called Dobem direct to the BRI (our NDB) and when Cardiff no longer need it they put it to us and 99 times out of 100 we put it on a heading (quite often pointing at the Avommouth area) and descend it. Then we turn the aircraft downwind over Filton and onto a base leg just west of the Bath conurbation.
For 09, Cardiff point the traffic onto a base leg from Dobem and it routes down across the east side of Cardiff city and over the Bristol channel towards Weston-S-M.

STARs will only be used if the traffic has no contact with any ATC frequency regardless of radar availability. Even if we are procedural ie sans radar, we would want the traffic to route direct to the BRI. Can't be doing with these new fangled STAR thingies!

[SteveSmith]

Thanks very much.

Steve.