Originally Posted by
Consol
Taxing along in LHR last week I heard an excited and somewhat vexed antipodean voice calling out ATC over some minor stop bar issue twice, seemed to be from a CX. ATC man calmly informed him that the verbal clearance had overall priority in any case. No biggie, it just seemed an over the top reaction in a very well controlled airport but I couldn't help thinking what a long flight that must have been for the other mortal pilot.
Consol, this post wasn’t clear on the circumstances, and I latched onto your comment that “verbal clearance had overall priority in any case”.
Verbal clearance can’t possibly have overall priority “in any case”. All you need is callsign confusion and you might as well not have installed the stop bars in the first place.
I can understand special cases where it is clear that there is a stop bar failure and SOP’s allow an override given special phraseology as has just been mentioned above. CASA has only just reached that level of maturity - an “Austro-regulator?”....
P.S. no excuse for being excited or vexed on R/T.